Saturday, June 14, 2008
Note on location of later chapters
Only the first part of the book is here below on screen. To view later chapters, click on Older Posts when you get to the bottom of what you can scroll down to. You will have to do this more than once to read the whole book. When you finish with the appendices and get to the glossary, you are done, I hope you enjoy Your Mythic Life and find it useful and thought provoking.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
NOTE TO READERS
Please post any comments you have about this book as comments to this post so I can easily find them without my having to look through all the chapters. If you want to leave a comment after a particular chapter, please post a comment here telling me which chapter got the comment. Thanks.
Hugh Brown
Hugh Brown
Saturday, May 5, 2007
INTRODUCTION
Your Mythic Life is a book about why we are the way we are and what you can do about it. Story is the basic format our minds use to organize and make sense of information. We all live as characters in various interrelated stories. With awareness of story structure, you can take charge of the script and write yourself a better story, thus improving your life.
Everything described in this book you can see for yourself by looking around in your daily life. No leaps of faith, religious or otherwise, are required; all you need is a willingness to view your life and human nature in a new way.
Hugh Brown
Everything described in this book you can see for yourself by looking around in your daily life. No leaps of faith, religious or otherwise, are required; all you need is a willingness to view your life and human nature in a new way.
Hugh Brown
I - QUESTIONS
How can I make my life better?
What should I do?
How do I tell right from wrong?
Why do I feel so different from other people?
Why do I sabotage my own happiness?
How can I get ahead?
What is the meaning of life?
Have you ever asked questions like these? Most of us have. I certainly have. If your experiences were like mine, the answers fell into one of four categories. The first were some variation on I Don’t Know. The second were nominally humorous answers aimed at discouraging such questions. The third type came from people who gave me answers that would have me put all my efforts toward improving their situation, not mine. And then there were the standard answers we’ve all heard a thousand times that never really work. We also ask ourselves these same questions and can’t do much better, so eventually we give up trying and do what we can to muddle through life.
I never gave up. I wanted to know. I wanted answers, real answers. I understood that these questions are so big that there might not be any final answers, but there had to be true, useful and productive answers.
The questions were easier to answer in hindsight: what I could have done, what I should have done, and, sometimes, why it happened that way. But I still needed to solve the problem of what to do now so the future would be optimum, a much more difficult problem given the vagaries of human nature, both my own and those of others.
Behind all the questions lay the same obstacle: human nature. What about us makes us be this way? Why are we so emotional, irrational, intelligent yet oblivious, capricious yet driven? Our behavior is neither random nor totally predictable. What deep pattern beneath our particular circumstances, culture and consciousness shapes our decisions and directs our lives? What is the source code for human nature? That was what I wanted, the underlying framework on which our lives are built. The problem was how to get at it.
Two forces drove me forward. The first was curiosity. Why are we the way we are? Why do people keep acting in all these ways that seem to make no sense? The second was my conviction that if I could understand the system, I could get on top of it and have the life I wanted.
The consensus held that human nature on the level I was after was unknowable and any attempt to reveal its secrets could only fail. Indeed, for years I made only minimal progress, but I never stopped trying, never stopped watching for some little opening, some little crack in the wall I could wiggle through and get inside the problem. As often happens, the break presented itself in the context of another adventure.
Adventures in Theater
Some years back my wife, Nancy Ory, a writer, suggested we might enjoy writing play scripts for the stage. So we read plays, went to plays, read books about how to write plays, and began writing. After various false starts, many rewrites and readings later, we had a script, Friends and Lovers, a romantic comedy that needed to be staged. We could get actors, but we soon learned that producing, directing, designing, building sets and lights, publicity, stage managing and cleaning the theater were up to us.
We had a one month run. Every night we would watch the audience watch our show. Each night the audience was different and the quality of acting varied from night to night. Yet consistently parts of the play did better than others. In comedy there is an unforgiving honesty—If They’re Not Laughing, You’re Not Funny. Beyond that, we could tell when the audience was engaged. They were paying attention, not coughing, squirming, or reading their programs.
Some lines always worked—the actors couldn’t kill them. Other lines that should have worked never did. I was faced with the question of what makes a line work, what makes a scene work, what makes a play work. Standard procedure in theater is when something is not working, try something else, anything else, until you get it to work. I wanted to do better than that. I wanted to be able to see exactly what the problem was and to fix it, quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
Mister Fixit
At the time, we were members of a local group of would-be playwrights who were remarkably good at writing scripts that needed a lot of fixing, so I got plenty of practice. Over time, I realized I was better at fixing plays than writing them.
To that end I worked with specific questions about play structure such as what makes an effective climax, how to give each character a different reality, and how to maintain meaningful conflict. In addition, I asked myself more basic questions about theater. Why do people go to plays? Why is it, at least when the play is working, that the entire audience will emotionally accept this obviously fictitious enactment as real? Why do people care at all about an obviously made up story that never happened? And why does good drama move people more deeply and thoroughly than good rational explanation of the same issues?
My policy was to pin the question down and wrestle with it and make it give me an answer, a real answer. Some answers just restate the question, such as “Why does comedy make people laugh? Because it’s funny.” I wanted answers that gave me new understanding.
Answers Emerge
Doing so, I learned a lot about plays. One point stood out. When the play is working, the audience is right there for it. The play goes directly into the mind of the audience and fits in all by itself. If instead of putting on the play, I had stood on stage and given a lecture about all the issues covered in the play, the audience would have had to think about what I was saying before the information could find a place in their minds to settle down. The play didn’t need the extra mental process. Why not?
It wasn’t just plays where this happened. It was in movies, novels, fairy tales, religious parables, ancient myths, and daily gossip. It was stories, any kind of story. There was something very special about stories.
Meanwhile, I had been immersing my mind in the details of play structure, how the parts of a play fit together to make it all work. Since plays are stories, I was also aware of what stories were made of, how they worked, and what a story looked like when I saw one.
At that point my world changed. I started seeing stories everywhere. Casual conversation was nearly all some form of storytelling. Television, radio, movies, newspapers, books: more of the same, an ongoing flood of stories. So were my own thoughts by day and dreams by night.
We live in an ocean of stories. Everyone does and always has. So far as is known, every culture, every society that has ever lived has told stories. If history is our guide, we can’t live without stories. Why not? Why are stories so central to human existence?
I had to answer this question if I wanted to understand plays and how to make them hold an audience. But soon my interest in the question grew beyond the theater as I went deeper into peeling apart why we are the way we are.
I watched people and what they were doing and discovered they were all doing the same thing. They were not acting like the semiautonomous rational beings we think we are, but rather as characters in many stories at once, making their way through multiple intertwined plots filled with all the conflicts, adventures, reversals, triumphs and catastrophes that can only be called the ongoing human drama. These stories were mythic, for myths are the stories that guide our lives. No wonder stories make so much sense to people. Story is the nature of our entire life experience. We all lead mythic lives.
I could see these same behavior patterns in myself. Even my thoughts followed story format. Thinking about what a story is led me to a startling conclusion. The human mind organizes all its information as stories. Stories are how we think. They are our world. And that is why a good story makes immediate sense. The mind has to translate everything else into story. Thus the play beats the lecture and people everywhere tell all kinds of stories. Which stories they tell matters, but the point is that they are all stories and as such all follow the same basic story structure.
As I came to understand human behavior as based on story structure, one concept led to another and what people did that seemed incomprehensible before came to make sense.
This book describes the role of mythic story in human life and how it affects everything we do. It presents a new explanation of human nature and gives you insights you need to understand the basis of human behavior, why we are the way we are. You can also use it to take control of your life.
This way of looking at life has a name. I call it Biomythology, which is another way of saying “the study of mythic story in life.”
Everything in this book comes out of observations of and thoughts about real, everyday human life. I make no appeals to spiritual arguments nor do I ask you to take anything I say on faith. I encourage you to see for yourself.
Your own life is full of examples of everything I am writing about. As you read, think about each idea in terms of examples from your own life and your own experience. If you need help in connecting what you read with what you have lived, Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, gives questions and other activities keyed to each chapter to help you get started.
The material in Appendix D can also be used as the basis for workshops and other group activities.
To study life’s mythic quality, you must be familiar with what a story is made of, how it is built, and what it does. Therefore we shall begin by exploring story structure.
What should I do?
How do I tell right from wrong?
Why do I feel so different from other people?
Why do I sabotage my own happiness?
How can I get ahead?
What is the meaning of life?
Have you ever asked questions like these? Most of us have. I certainly have. If your experiences were like mine, the answers fell into one of four categories. The first were some variation on I Don’t Know. The second were nominally humorous answers aimed at discouraging such questions. The third type came from people who gave me answers that would have me put all my efforts toward improving their situation, not mine. And then there were the standard answers we’ve all heard a thousand times that never really work. We also ask ourselves these same questions and can’t do much better, so eventually we give up trying and do what we can to muddle through life.
I never gave up. I wanted to know. I wanted answers, real answers. I understood that these questions are so big that there might not be any final answers, but there had to be true, useful and productive answers.
The questions were easier to answer in hindsight: what I could have done, what I should have done, and, sometimes, why it happened that way. But I still needed to solve the problem of what to do now so the future would be optimum, a much more difficult problem given the vagaries of human nature, both my own and those of others.
Behind all the questions lay the same obstacle: human nature. What about us makes us be this way? Why are we so emotional, irrational, intelligent yet oblivious, capricious yet driven? Our behavior is neither random nor totally predictable. What deep pattern beneath our particular circumstances, culture and consciousness shapes our decisions and directs our lives? What is the source code for human nature? That was what I wanted, the underlying framework on which our lives are built. The problem was how to get at it.
Two forces drove me forward. The first was curiosity. Why are we the way we are? Why do people keep acting in all these ways that seem to make no sense? The second was my conviction that if I could understand the system, I could get on top of it and have the life I wanted.
The consensus held that human nature on the level I was after was unknowable and any attempt to reveal its secrets could only fail. Indeed, for years I made only minimal progress, but I never stopped trying, never stopped watching for some little opening, some little crack in the wall I could wiggle through and get inside the problem. As often happens, the break presented itself in the context of another adventure.
Adventures in Theater
Some years back my wife, Nancy Ory, a writer, suggested we might enjoy writing play scripts for the stage. So we read plays, went to plays, read books about how to write plays, and began writing. After various false starts, many rewrites and readings later, we had a script, Friends and Lovers, a romantic comedy that needed to be staged. We could get actors, but we soon learned that producing, directing, designing, building sets and lights, publicity, stage managing and cleaning the theater were up to us.
We had a one month run. Every night we would watch the audience watch our show. Each night the audience was different and the quality of acting varied from night to night. Yet consistently parts of the play did better than others. In comedy there is an unforgiving honesty—If They’re Not Laughing, You’re Not Funny. Beyond that, we could tell when the audience was engaged. They were paying attention, not coughing, squirming, or reading their programs.
Some lines always worked—the actors couldn’t kill them. Other lines that should have worked never did. I was faced with the question of what makes a line work, what makes a scene work, what makes a play work. Standard procedure in theater is when something is not working, try something else, anything else, until you get it to work. I wanted to do better than that. I wanted to be able to see exactly what the problem was and to fix it, quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
Mister Fixit
At the time, we were members of a local group of would-be playwrights who were remarkably good at writing scripts that needed a lot of fixing, so I got plenty of practice. Over time, I realized I was better at fixing plays than writing them.
To that end I worked with specific questions about play structure such as what makes an effective climax, how to give each character a different reality, and how to maintain meaningful conflict. In addition, I asked myself more basic questions about theater. Why do people go to plays? Why is it, at least when the play is working, that the entire audience will emotionally accept this obviously fictitious enactment as real? Why do people care at all about an obviously made up story that never happened? And why does good drama move people more deeply and thoroughly than good rational explanation of the same issues?
My policy was to pin the question down and wrestle with it and make it give me an answer, a real answer. Some answers just restate the question, such as “Why does comedy make people laugh? Because it’s funny.” I wanted answers that gave me new understanding.
Answers Emerge
Doing so, I learned a lot about plays. One point stood out. When the play is working, the audience is right there for it. The play goes directly into the mind of the audience and fits in all by itself. If instead of putting on the play, I had stood on stage and given a lecture about all the issues covered in the play, the audience would have had to think about what I was saying before the information could find a place in their minds to settle down. The play didn’t need the extra mental process. Why not?
It wasn’t just plays where this happened. It was in movies, novels, fairy tales, religious parables, ancient myths, and daily gossip. It was stories, any kind of story. There was something very special about stories.
Meanwhile, I had been immersing my mind in the details of play structure, how the parts of a play fit together to make it all work. Since plays are stories, I was also aware of what stories were made of, how they worked, and what a story looked like when I saw one.
At that point my world changed. I started seeing stories everywhere. Casual conversation was nearly all some form of storytelling. Television, radio, movies, newspapers, books: more of the same, an ongoing flood of stories. So were my own thoughts by day and dreams by night.
We live in an ocean of stories. Everyone does and always has. So far as is known, every culture, every society that has ever lived has told stories. If history is our guide, we can’t live without stories. Why not? Why are stories so central to human existence?
I had to answer this question if I wanted to understand plays and how to make them hold an audience. But soon my interest in the question grew beyond the theater as I went deeper into peeling apart why we are the way we are.
I watched people and what they were doing and discovered they were all doing the same thing. They were not acting like the semiautonomous rational beings we think we are, but rather as characters in many stories at once, making their way through multiple intertwined plots filled with all the conflicts, adventures, reversals, triumphs and catastrophes that can only be called the ongoing human drama. These stories were mythic, for myths are the stories that guide our lives. No wonder stories make so much sense to people. Story is the nature of our entire life experience. We all lead mythic lives.
I could see these same behavior patterns in myself. Even my thoughts followed story format. Thinking about what a story is led me to a startling conclusion. The human mind organizes all its information as stories. Stories are how we think. They are our world. And that is why a good story makes immediate sense. The mind has to translate everything else into story. Thus the play beats the lecture and people everywhere tell all kinds of stories. Which stories they tell matters, but the point is that they are all stories and as such all follow the same basic story structure.
As I came to understand human behavior as based on story structure, one concept led to another and what people did that seemed incomprehensible before came to make sense.
This book describes the role of mythic story in human life and how it affects everything we do. It presents a new explanation of human nature and gives you insights you need to understand the basis of human behavior, why we are the way we are. You can also use it to take control of your life.
This way of looking at life has a name. I call it Biomythology, which is another way of saying “the study of mythic story in life.”
Everything in this book comes out of observations of and thoughts about real, everyday human life. I make no appeals to spiritual arguments nor do I ask you to take anything I say on faith. I encourage you to see for yourself.
Your own life is full of examples of everything I am writing about. As you read, think about each idea in terms of examples from your own life and your own experience. If you need help in connecting what you read with what you have lived, Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, gives questions and other activities keyed to each chapter to help you get started.
The material in Appendix D can also be used as the basis for workshops and other group activities.
To study life’s mythic quality, you must be familiar with what a story is made of, how it is built, and what it does. Therefore we shall begin by exploring story structure.
II - STORY
Everyone loves a good story. Our lives are full of stories, from the bedtime stories of childhood to stories of our lives told at our funerals.
We tell stories all the time. Gossip consists of stories. Ask “What did you do today?” or “How was your day?” and you will get your answer back in story form. Open the newspaper; you get news stories. Turn on the television; the programs present stories. Whether they are dramas, sitcoms, talk shows, news, sports, movies, or game shows, they all deliver information in basic story structure.
Religions all convey information through story. Open the Bible. The overwhelming percentage of the text is stories. Check out other religions and notice the role of story.
If there is any culture, any tribe, any social group, anywhere in the world, that does not tell stories, I do not know who or where it is.
You are asleep at night. You dream. What do you dream? Stories . . . they may be boring, or bizarre, or terrifying, but they are stories. Dreams are largely beyond our conscious control, yet they consistently take the form of a story.
Clearly, there is something very fundamental about stories and the way the human mind organizes information. Let us now examine the structure of a story.
What is a Story?
Normally when we hear a story we understand it to be about what certain people or other characters did, why they did it, and what came of it, a recounting of events, and that’s what happened. This the audience perceives. This the audience believes.
The time has come for you to stop being just another member of the audience. Get up out of your seat and come with me. I want to take you backstage and show you what a story is, what it is made of, how it is put together, how it works, and what it does.
A word of caution is in order here. If you come with me, you can’t go back. Stories are not what you think they are; once you understand their true nature, stories will lose much of their magical hold on you. In place of that, you will walk through life with a new awareness of how human society works and what it’s all about. That’s a choice you will have to make. If you decide to proceed, your mind may rebel at being led to give up a reality it has depended on for your entire life. If you find yourself either immediately rejecting what I am saying, or feeling threatened or confused, that’s okay. There are a lot of new ideas. Take your time so you don’t feel overwhelmed by them.
Keep in mind that I am writing about everyday life: actions, thoughts, feelings, situations, and relationships we all experience. Your own life is full of examples of everything I am saying in this book, so you can look at your own life in light of what I am going to tell you and make up your own mind whether or not you think it is so. The ideas in this book may be new to you, but if you take your time reading to consider and work with these ideas, you will see that they are both true and powerful. At that point you can start making your life be what you want it to be. As I said, it’s your choice. With you or without you we will now proceed.
A story recounts something which is happening, did happen, will happen, or that we can imagine happening. Something, but not just anything. Stories are not what you think they are. Stories are never exactly what happened, never the complete picture. Ask any two people to tell you the story of some event you all three witnessed. One won’t tell the same story as the other, and you will feel that both left out some important points you would have included.
All three of your stories combined are still not what happened. They are stories based on what happened. We always make a selection from what we can remember when we assemble our story and assume or create what we need to fill in the gaps. The gaps are also in our perceptions. No one can observe everything.
As we make sense of our experiences, we assign meanings to our actions and perceptions and rank them in relevance and importance to the situation at hand. No two people will make the same decisions about the stories they tell. We all put our own slant on everything we say and do. There are no unbiased stories. Every story is an expression of a particular storyteller and comes out of his own experience and imagination. Every story is different.
Yet all stories have similarities. If the story is to hold our attention and engage our minds, it cannot be just any recounting of events. A successful story has a definite dramatic framework. The storyteller may or may not be aware of the rules of story structure, but if the story is working, you can be sure the rules are being followed.
All stories are different. Each one follows the rules in its own way. But once you know the rules, you can see their effect in every story and how they make that story work.
A story starts with the situation at point A and takes it to point B through a series of events. Something happens to get us from A to B. Some stories appear to go from point A back to point A. “I had this problem and I did this and that and these and those and the other about it and I still have the same problem.” That is a story. Notice that even though you are still apparently at point A, your experience is different at the end than at the beginning. You may not have moved physically, but you have moved psychologically as a result of your efforts.
A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We begin at A, in the middle we are moving, and we end at B. The story begins with an ongoing context in which a significant event happens. For example, let’s examine a simple little story. Suppose our story is Boy Meets Girl. “Once upon a time in a large city there lived a boy.” Here we have the ongoing context, the soil into which we shall drop the seed that will grow into a story. “One day he was walking down the street trying to figure out in his mind an algebraic solution to the Three Body Problem.* Just as he got to a tricky place in the equations, he looked up and there she was, the girl, a lovely, thoughtful girl. At that moment she was wondering if there were any exceptions to the Universal Law of Stuff, that the volume of one’s possessions always grows to exceed all available storage space.”
Here is a significant event. Without the girl, the boy would keep on walking down that same street thinking about the Three Body Problem forever and nobody would care much for
the story. Enter the girl, though, and things are looking up. Someone new has come into the boy’s life.
At this point, there will be a question in our minds. What is the significance of the girl? The answer is found in the actions and attitudes of the boy as a result of their encounter. Suppose the boy saw this beautiful girl but just walked on down the street and we never hear from her again. In that case, the function of the girl could be to demonstrate the single-mindedness of the boy. She would be part of the preexisting context, not a significant event that puts the story in motion.
The Big Question
Now suppose instead that on seeing the girl he falls in love with her. This is more like it. We now know the significance of the girl. She has interrupted the boy’s normal life. The plot takes a turn when the compelling odd event enters the picture. The boy now has to deal with a situation, a question, beyond his previous experience, something new. His life has been disrupted by his sudden love for the girl and he wants to win her. We now have a question. Can the boy get the girl? He must decide to take action to answer the question. Why? The standard explanation is that the question and its call for resolution have unbalanced his life so he must do something to answer the question in order to get back to normal.
That explanation will not do. It is intended for the audience and demands a suspension of disbelief so that the boy, a character created for a story, may be considered as a real person with free will. Even so, the explanation is flawed. In real life most boys who see a beautiful girl on the street admire her, wish they could win her, realize they can’t, and do nothing about it.
If you have ever written an original story, you know the backstage point of view. Why does the boy take action? Why does he respond to the question? Because the story needs him to. If he does nothing, the story dies; the audience gets bored, demands its money back and goes home. The characters are there to serve the story. The story does not serve the characters.
So it is with everything in the story. Each element of it helps make it a good story. Anything that does not has no business being there. That leads to a question. What is a good story? One that holds the audience’s attention. They might not agree with it but they are there for what the story delivers.
The question now is what stories deliver. The answer is that they deliver a lot. A well done story can entertain us. It can also teach us. It can also comfort, delight, scare, persuade, amaze, revolt, anger, distract, charm, ennoble, inspire, shame, pacify, embarrass, arouse, excite, titillate, or humor us. Stories move us in any number of emotional directions with a strength that can rival or even surpass direct experience. They are an extremely powerful way to convey information. Tell a wonderful, entertaining story and the audience will accept your fiction as valid.
The Appeal of Story
But why do we care? Why do we give our whole attention to some tale that can be, with our full knowledge, completely fictional, totally made up, something that never happened at all? We do because we want to know. Human existence is far too complex to ever fully master. By eliminating extraneous information, a good story gives us a simplified and therefore more comprehensible version of life. We need to understand reality in order to survive and prosper in it. We accept the fictitious story’s parallels to reality as accurate insights into life. Stories show us what could happen in circumstances we may not have experienced, thus helping us make sense of the past, cope with the present, and foresee the future. We are all anxious, we are all competitive, we are all curious.
We have anxieties. We are not sure how we stack up against other people, so we identify with characters in conflict with others, especially in conflicts similar to ones we fear. Unknown situations threaten us, so following a character’s strange adventures helps us cope with our fears.
We want acceptance and approval. There are aspects of each of us that are far from ideal which we hide from others. In a story a character’s weaknesses will be revealed. We are fascinated by the results of this exposure and how the character copes.
One benefit of acceptance and approval is having alliances with others. These may be with friends, kin, team members, or even strangers. The alliances may be informal or formalized such as contractual alliances between buyer and seller. We are dependent on these relationships for our survival, yet they always bear some level of instability. Stories are full of shifting, broken, underhanded, and deceptive alliances and we love to watch it all happen.
We are competitive. We want to win. We want to come out ahead of other people. Stories can show us winning strategies we can copy and mistakes we can avoid. We are shown how each of a character’s actions affect his forward progress and whether or not those actions are effective in conflicts with others.
We are curious. We want to know. We want answers. Stories are built out of questions and answers. A question is raised at the beginning and answered at the end. The boy will get the girl or he will not. Other stories answer different questions. A good story’s question engages us, for it has relevance to the uncertainties that frame our lives and drive us forward, the main one being “Which way is forward?” We need to know, to satisfy our eternal curiosity. We seek both new knowledge and confirmation of our existing convictions. We approach change with a mix of eagerness and fear.
We also depend on stories to help fill out our lives. Most of our days are routine and predictable. Stories take us on an emotional roller coaster through new territory and adventures. Stories enlarge our mental experience.
A story is like an experiment. Both lead us to an answer to a question, an answer larger than the particular chain of events witnessed. In an experiment we put this and those together under controlled conditions and see what happens. In a story we put a chosen group of characters into a particular situation and follow them to a conclusion.
Experiments are used to correlate cause and effect. The situation is simplified so that causes irrelevant to the question are excluded so that only causes of interest will affect the result. Thus we can see clearly what cause is making which effect happen. The knowledge gained is then applied to the larger world.
So it is with stories. The storyteller is trying to show a correlation between how certain actions by particular characters in response to the story question produce a specific result, the answer to the question. As is done in the experiment, a skillful storyteller eliminates everything from the story that is not necessary to understand the situation, characters, and actions that give the question that particular answer. Unlike real life, in which people have a wide range of actions, stories present a world of very limited action, so the answer and its causes and meanings are clear. Thus the story can make sense of the mysteries and confusions of life.
Time for Action
But how does the question affect the world of the story? When the storyteller puts the girl in view of the boy, the question of Can the Boy Get the Girl takes over the boy’s mind. His world has been expanded, because now it includes his love for the girl. If the story is to have any meaning, the boy cannot go back to his old life the way it was. The events of the story have changed his world forever. His life will never be the same. The question made a difference and so will the answer. That is why the story has meaning, why we care and why we pay attention to the story. The question and the answer it gets through the plot of the story matter to us.
So far in Boy Meets Girl we have a background reality context. We have a main character, a protagonist, the boy, and a secondary character, the girl.* We have an event, the appearance of the girl (pun intended), that raises a question.
Until the boy has finished his adventure with the girl, he cannot go back to a simple life of walking down the street and even then, his life will be different. Life has been disrupted by a question. Let’s rejoin the boy and see what he is going to do about it.
Oh, good. We got back just in time. He is walking up to the girl. He asks her “Will
you marry me so we can live happily ever after?” He has now taken an action to answer his
question. What are the consequences of that action? He could get an immediate answer. The girl could say “What a great idea, and it’s so fortunate that we are standing in front of a
church. Let’s go inside and get married.” They do and live happily ever after. The story
ends and the answer to Can the Boy Get the Girl is yes.
Suppose the girl accepts differently, saying “I’d love to marry you. I’m free on Tuesday afternoon. How does two o’clock sound?” Now the situation is more complex. Is the story over, the question answered? That depends on what we understand in the story “getting the girl” to consist of. If her acceptance of his proposal will do, then the story is over. If “getting the girl” requires marriage, the story will not be over until 2 p.m. Tuesday. If this story is at all typical, the boy and girl had better watch out, because getting to the altar on time will be the hardest thing they ever do.
Now suppose the girl says no. If the boy sees his love for her as a lost cause and gives up on her, he accepts her negative reply and the story ends and the answer is no. If he does not accept her answer as final, the question Can the Boy Get the Girl is still open and the story continues as he takes further action to win her.
The Way is Blocked
When the protagonist moves to answer the story’s question, we go from the beginning of the story to the middle, where we will remain until the climax.
The middle is usually the longest part of the story. It consists of a series of actions arising from the characters’ attempts to deal with the story question. Some will happen easily and go well. Others will be difficult and/or engender complications. The easy actions get brief mention. The heart of the story is actions that either are trouble or cause trouble. The characters run into obstacles. Stories are about characters (not just the protagonist) coping with these obstacles and the resultant complications. These events keep the main question from being quickly and easily answered so the story may continue.
Obstacles are what fill out the plot. Without them we wouldn’t have much of a story. Your average romantic tale could be reduced to one sentence. “Once upon a time they found each other, got married, and lived happily ever after.”
The storyteller puts obstacles in the path the boy takes to win the girl. As he deals with the obstacles, the boy will change the world by his actions and change himself by learning from his experiences. He cannot go back to a state identical to his previous existence. Each obstacle he copes with causes a shift in the world experienced by the boy and is another step in the process of transformation that is the story.
The boy is not the only one who faces obstacles. All the major characters have them so the progress of their agendas will be in doubt. We won’t know who will prevail. The answer to the story question will remain unknown until the storyteller reveals it.
Each obstacle creates a small story within the larger plot. The character has a problem, so we have the question of can he solve the problem and how. He will take action that will give us an answer. That answer will give him a new obstacle. If not, something else in the story, another character, the forces of nature, random chance, his own subconscious, has to do it. But there must soon be another obstacle. If not, the question-answer pattern will be disrupted and the audience will lose interest.
Similarly, if an obstacle is either trivial or impossible, the answer is obvious beforehand and interest in the story will drop at that point. If the girl’s reply to the boy’s proposal had been “Yes, if you will kiss me,” and he gladly and easily does with no complications, the story drops. If she says “Yes, but only if you grow to eight feet tall in the next three seconds,” unless the story is set outside normal reality, the obstacle is clearly impossible. Either the story ends at this point or the obstacle must become possible. He could try to get her to modify or drop her height requirement.
Trivial or impossible obstacles cause a problem. As soon as the question is raised, we know the answer, so the actions of the character give us no new information. Against a trivial obstacle the character prevails and against an impossible obstacle he fails. We already know that, so the storyteller loses our attention as our minds wander off to more amusing thoughts. He then has to win us back, which can be difficult.
Relevant Obstacles
In a normal story, obstacles are not random. Not just any problem will do. The question posed by the obstacle needs to logically arise from the main question of the story and the answer to the obstacle question needs to help fill out the answer to the main story question. The answer to the obstacle question is a secondary answer to the main question that will support the main answer we get at the end of the story. If in response to the boy’s proposal, the girl had answered “No, you don’t have a job,” we would accept that obstacle because we understand the relation of income to wedded bliss. If she had said “No, because the President of the United States wears ugly ties,” we would not take it seriously because there is no logical connection between the obstacle’s question and our understanding of how boys get girls. Note that the obstacle is neither trivial nor impossible. It would be difficult, but possible, for the boy to go to Washington and convince the President to wear better ties. But the story would have to first set up a logical connection between true love and presidential ties, or the story would become laughable.
Indeed, ridiculous, irrelevant obstacles are a standard part of comedy. Suppose the girl is two blocks away and the boy has one minute to get to her. First he is stopped by a sidewalk preacher. Then he has to go around a construction hole in the street and dodge heavy machinery. Suddenly he is blocked by a parade. After he fights his way through the endless marching band, all looks clear ahead. Then from a doorway a gorilla steps out and blocks his path. He gets free from the gorilla and a flying saucer lands in his way. I dare the audience to keep a straight face.
Obstacle Hierarchy
So far we have considered obstacles that are direct barriers to answering the main question of the story. Most obstacles stand between the character and the resolution of some other obstacle. To get the girl, the boy needs a job. To get the job, he needs to find who is hiring. To find that out, he needs to buy a newspaper. To get the newspaper, he needs fifty cents. To get fifty cents, he has to look under the couch cushions, but his roommate is asleep on the couch. If he wakes up the roommate, there will be further complications, on and on.
So it is with everything in the life of a character. Every little move he makes, every step he takes, is in an effort to overcome some obstacle, something standing between where he is and where he wants to be. As soon as he gets there he has a new set of problems. A character’s life in a story has a few successful moments like tiny islands scattered across a vast sea of trouble.
Since any character, if looked at closely enough, copes with a semi-infinite number of obstacles, much of the storyteller’s job is editing out and bridging over all obstacles that do not contribute to a full answer at the end of the story. If obstacles whose questions and answers are irrelevant to the main question and answer are left in the story, the audience will get anxious. They will ask questions like “What is the point of all this?” and “Where is this leading?” They feel that the story is meandering, wandering about with no clear goal in sight. The irrelevant obstacles divert the plot from the track the audience wants, movement toward the story’s answer.
Agenda Conflicts
One source of obstacles the characters face is each other. In a good story the characters have different questions they are trying to answer. This gives them agendas that are mutually contradictory. The boy wants to marry the girl now. She wants him to first get a job and improve his life. As they are discussing this, Mr. Cool rolls up in his shiny red sports car and winks at her. She gets into the car and they drive away, leaving the boy with a new set of problems. The girl will discover her agenda differences with Mr. Cool later on that evening.
The characters are such trouble for each other because the story needs them to be. Each one should to be a different kind of person who sees the world and his place in it in his own way and therefore has a unique set of needs and desires, an agenda different from the others. The questions of stories are about what kind of character will prevail in a given situation and how he will do it.
If each character is trying to advance his agenda and the agendas are mutually exclusive, they cannot all succeed. The boy and Mr. Cool cannot both win the girl. They could both lose. The girl could stay single. But that is not as satisfying. Who wants the game to end in a tie? We want winners and losers so we will know who is better, who is dominant, and which strategy we can learn from to come out ahead.
Obstacles are about dominance. Either the character dominates the obstacle and bends it to his will or the obstacle dominates him and he either does something else, some third force eliminates the obstacle, or that character’s involvement in the story stops.
Characters have agendas. They want. Which character will get his way? Usually one character prevails, then another. The dominance shifts. Stories are built out of dominance reversals. No one agenda prevails for long. That way, the outcome is in doubt because no one is reliably more powerful than anyone else. The uncertainty holds the audience’s attention and maintains the meaning of the obstacles, since the answer to the main question cannot be known yet.
Sometimes the story is best if an obstacle question is raised and left hanging while other questions are answered. The plot can change focus from one character’s situation to another. The interrupted unanswered question can increase suspense and thus the audience’s desire for an answer. The delayed answer pattern also keeps the story from being too straightforward and obvious.
Two simultaneous obstacles can reinforce the importance of each. While Mr. Cool is trying to make time with the girl, the boy must delay his efforts to find a job so he can think of some way to get the girl away from Mr. Cool. The audience does not know how well Mr. Cool is doing with the girl, so the boy’s attempts to sabotage their relationship are of more unpredictable outcome. At the same time, Mr. Cool’s efforts are of greater significance because of the obstacles being prepared by the boy. Can Mr. Cool win the girl enough to weather the upcoming challenge? The storyteller can switch back and forth between progress by the boy and Mr. Cool and keep the audience hooked.
There are three types of obstacles. First there are pragmatic obstacles. While Mr. Cool and the girl are in the restaurant, the boy is out in the parking lot trying to push the sports car into a handicap space so Mr. Cool will get a ticket. The boy has trouble because his shoes slip on the wet pavement. Second, there are obstacles caused by conflicts within the character’s agenda. The boy cannot put all his effort into moving the car because he is afraid of being caught and keeps looking around. Third, there are obstacles caused by another character with a competing agenda. Here comes Mr. Cool.
In stories, agendas advance with great difficulty, hounded by these three kinds of obstacle. This is the pattern of stories, over and over. The protagonist’s agenda is formed by the main question of the story. How he copes with the obstacles will give us the answer at the end.
The Climax
At the end of the story, after dealing with numerous lesser obstacles, we arrive at the largest obstacle in the story, the hardest one to overcome, the climax. This will be where all is gained or all is lost, because this final grand obstacle will give us at last the answer to the main question of the story. Because this answer will be filled out by all the secondary answers, it will seem more true, complete, and meaningful than it would have if the story had lacked all the other obstacles.
Yet at the same time, the climax must not be a trivial or impossible obstacle. The storyteller’s creativity will be tested, because the climax has been set up by the story question and the preceding obstacles, yet those must not make the answer obvious. The outcome must be in doubt until the last possible moment. Coming up with a satisfying climax is a real challenge for any storyteller and to have created one is a feat worthy of genuine pride.
Even if the story is one in a genre in which the outcome is known, the climax can still hold our attention. We know that in the mystery story our hero, the detective, is going to solve the murder. In our own story of Boy Meets Girl, we know that ultimately the boy will get the girl. So what do we do for a climax? We put the boy up against an apparently impossible obstacle that he overcomes by means supported by his actions against previous obstacles, yet that are not foreseeable by the audience. A common way to do this is for him to be forced by his desperation to move beyond his previous mental and physical abilities, to give more than 100%. Perhaps he runs faster than he ever has before, or thinks up a new understanding of the human condition that melts her heart.
Breaking new ground can make for an effective climax. If the protagonist believably thinks up what has never before been conceived and does what has never before been done in order to prevail, a good foundation for the climax will be in place.
What must not happen is for the boy or the situation to change its nature before our eyes to hand him an easy win. Suppose at the climax the girl is standing outside the church and the boy has about one minute to win the girl before she has to go inside and marry Mr. Cool, and suddenly word arrives that Mr. Cool dropped dead on the spot, so the boy gets the girl by default. Or, with one minute to go, and no foreshadowing, no hint of this in the story so far, the boy tells the girl his rich uncle in Australia died and left him ten million dollars. Endings like these are cheap shots. The audience feels cheated and disappointed because such endings do not provide valid answers to the original story question, answers that are supported by the previous obstacles and help the audience deal with their own lives.
What will work as a climax is for the boy to take action that we can believe he could and would take under the circumstances. The action will conclusively demonstrate that the boy is more worthy than Mr. Cool of the girl’s love. Perhaps the boy will risk his life to save the girl from some misfortune while Mr. Cool dithers. Maybe the boy will win a final confrontation with Mr. Cool which reveals how superior the boy is, thus winning the hand of the girl.
A common technique to justify the climax and increase doubt about its outcome is the use of the dark moment. Fate has turned against the boy. Everything has gone wrong for him. The girl is about to marry Mr. Cool. The boy couldn’t find a job and now he can’t find the church. He gets lost trying to take a shortcut through the woods. Despite running as fast as he can from the sheriff, he gets arrested for trespassing. He is now in jail. We want the boy to succeed but he is stuck, apparently doomed to lose the girl. Nevertheless, the boy does not give up. Somehow he finds his way to one last chance to get the girl and we move from the dark moment up to the climax.
After the climax has been dealt with and we have the answer to the story’s question, we reach the conclusion. Here we tie up loose ends as the characters return from their adventure to normal life. It will not be the same normal life as at the beginning, but it will be clear the story is over, and that the storyteller needs to get off stage now. My rule for plays is that once the question is answered, the playwright gets one page of script, maximum, to get that curtain down and send the audience home. There is little that will ruin a good story more effectively than a conclusion that goes on and on. The question is answered. The audience is ready to go home, wants to go home, but feels trapped and soon develops a hatred for the storyteller and his story. Whatever else you do, get off stage before they throw you off stage.
Dramatic Tension
The audience needs an answer to the story’s question. The obstacles as dealt with by the characters answer secondary questions related to the main question. The flow of secondary answers increases the audience’s emotional commitment to getting a final answer. A focused excitement occurs as the approaching main answer gains importance in the audience’s mind due to the gradual assemblage of secondary answers.
At the same time, the storyteller uses obstacles to both delay the final answer and keep it in doubt. The answer’s importance and its uncertainty keep the audience glued to the story in a state of dramatic tension. The audience thinks the excitement and tension are in the story. They are mistaken. The story is neutral. The emotions are in the mind of the audience. That is “mind,” not “minds.” A good storyteller will manipulate the attention of his audience into a state where every mind is in step with every other and they think and react as one—the mind of the audience. Some time when you are in a group story situation, perhaps at a movie or a play, consciously break your attention from the story and watch the audience. If the story has them in hold, you will see the unified mind.
The manipulation of attention is at the heart of good storytelling. The audience craves being taken for the ride and gladly gives time, money, and attention to get it. The ride consists of a carefully crafted emotional sequence. If the story kept the audience at the same emotional level throughout, the story would pall. It would be monotonous. The storyteller creates a dramatic rhythm with his choice, sequence, and timing of obstacles and actions. The audience is led up and down through a variety of emotions, building to the high point at the climax. The effect is heightened if we experience the story as real, for then it has more meaning since we accept it as an accurate view of life. It carries more weight with us, so we fall into the willing suspension of disbelief for the sake of the experience. Even though we know it is a made up story, we want to know what happened, we want to know if the boy got the girl.
What happened was as the boy was trying to make himself think of how to get out of jail, his mind kept going back to his memory of the trees and bushes flying past him as he ran faster and faster trying to outrun the sheriff. The way the trees went by—Yes!—that’s how to set up the coordinates and if you do that, those terms drop out, and the equations fall into place. The boy grabbed a paper towel and wrote it out. Yes, it really worked. He had algebraically solved the Three Body Problem. Just at that moment he was allowed to make his one phone call. He was so excited he called the chief mathematician at NASA and described his solution.
A few minutes later, not only did the boy have a solid job offer from NASA, they made the sheriff let the boy out of jail and give him a ride to the church. In walked the boy just as the preacher asked if there were any objections to the marriage of the girl and Mr. Cool.
The boy exclaimed to the crowd “Yes. I have algebraically solved the Three Body Problem and I have a job with NASA.” The girl ran to him and an awful row broke out. Soon the boy and Mr. Cool were rolling on the floor fighting. Mr. Cool was getting the best of it and almost subdued the boy. At that moment, the boy realized that Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be restated as “You can’t push on anything that doesn’t push back.” Armed with that knowledge he soon got the upper hand and won the fight and married the girl on the spot.
So the boy did get the girl, and just as we hoped, they got married and lived happily ever after (except for a minor disagreement a couple of years ago about the color of the living room drapes). Mr. Cool never married, but became the assistant manager of a discount tire franchise in Wichita Falls.
* The Three Body Problem is to describe the motions of three objects in space as influenced by their mutual gravitational attraction. So far, in the real world it has never been solved algebraically.
* The boy, not the girl, is the protagonist because it is his question, not hers, that is getting answered. If the same sequence of events were told such that they followed answering her question, she would be the protagonist and it would be her story, not his, that was being told.
We tell stories all the time. Gossip consists of stories. Ask “What did you do today?” or “How was your day?” and you will get your answer back in story form. Open the newspaper; you get news stories. Turn on the television; the programs present stories. Whether they are dramas, sitcoms, talk shows, news, sports, movies, or game shows, they all deliver information in basic story structure.
Religions all convey information through story. Open the Bible. The overwhelming percentage of the text is stories. Check out other religions and notice the role of story.
If there is any culture, any tribe, any social group, anywhere in the world, that does not tell stories, I do not know who or where it is.
You are asleep at night. You dream. What do you dream? Stories . . . they may be boring, or bizarre, or terrifying, but they are stories. Dreams are largely beyond our conscious control, yet they consistently take the form of a story.
Clearly, there is something very fundamental about stories and the way the human mind organizes information. Let us now examine the structure of a story.
What is a Story?
Normally when we hear a story we understand it to be about what certain people or other characters did, why they did it, and what came of it, a recounting of events, and that’s what happened. This the audience perceives. This the audience believes.
The time has come for you to stop being just another member of the audience. Get up out of your seat and come with me. I want to take you backstage and show you what a story is, what it is made of, how it is put together, how it works, and what it does.
A word of caution is in order here. If you come with me, you can’t go back. Stories are not what you think they are; once you understand their true nature, stories will lose much of their magical hold on you. In place of that, you will walk through life with a new awareness of how human society works and what it’s all about. That’s a choice you will have to make. If you decide to proceed, your mind may rebel at being led to give up a reality it has depended on for your entire life. If you find yourself either immediately rejecting what I am saying, or feeling threatened or confused, that’s okay. There are a lot of new ideas. Take your time so you don’t feel overwhelmed by them.
Keep in mind that I am writing about everyday life: actions, thoughts, feelings, situations, and relationships we all experience. Your own life is full of examples of everything I am saying in this book, so you can look at your own life in light of what I am going to tell you and make up your own mind whether or not you think it is so. The ideas in this book may be new to you, but if you take your time reading to consider and work with these ideas, you will see that they are both true and powerful. At that point you can start making your life be what you want it to be. As I said, it’s your choice. With you or without you we will now proceed.
A story recounts something which is happening, did happen, will happen, or that we can imagine happening. Something, but not just anything. Stories are not what you think they are. Stories are never exactly what happened, never the complete picture. Ask any two people to tell you the story of some event you all three witnessed. One won’t tell the same story as the other, and you will feel that both left out some important points you would have included.
All three of your stories combined are still not what happened. They are stories based on what happened. We always make a selection from what we can remember when we assemble our story and assume or create what we need to fill in the gaps. The gaps are also in our perceptions. No one can observe everything.
As we make sense of our experiences, we assign meanings to our actions and perceptions and rank them in relevance and importance to the situation at hand. No two people will make the same decisions about the stories they tell. We all put our own slant on everything we say and do. There are no unbiased stories. Every story is an expression of a particular storyteller and comes out of his own experience and imagination. Every story is different.
Yet all stories have similarities. If the story is to hold our attention and engage our minds, it cannot be just any recounting of events. A successful story has a definite dramatic framework. The storyteller may or may not be aware of the rules of story structure, but if the story is working, you can be sure the rules are being followed.
All stories are different. Each one follows the rules in its own way. But once you know the rules, you can see their effect in every story and how they make that story work.
A story starts with the situation at point A and takes it to point B through a series of events. Something happens to get us from A to B. Some stories appear to go from point A back to point A. “I had this problem and I did this and that and these and those and the other about it and I still have the same problem.” That is a story. Notice that even though you are still apparently at point A, your experience is different at the end than at the beginning. You may not have moved physically, but you have moved psychologically as a result of your efforts.
A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We begin at A, in the middle we are moving, and we end at B. The story begins with an ongoing context in which a significant event happens. For example, let’s examine a simple little story. Suppose our story is Boy Meets Girl. “Once upon a time in a large city there lived a boy.” Here we have the ongoing context, the soil into which we shall drop the seed that will grow into a story. “One day he was walking down the street trying to figure out in his mind an algebraic solution to the Three Body Problem.* Just as he got to a tricky place in the equations, he looked up and there she was, the girl, a lovely, thoughtful girl. At that moment she was wondering if there were any exceptions to the Universal Law of Stuff, that the volume of one’s possessions always grows to exceed all available storage space.”
Here is a significant event. Without the girl, the boy would keep on walking down that same street thinking about the Three Body Problem forever and nobody would care much for
the story. Enter the girl, though, and things are looking up. Someone new has come into the boy’s life.
At this point, there will be a question in our minds. What is the significance of the girl? The answer is found in the actions and attitudes of the boy as a result of their encounter. Suppose the boy saw this beautiful girl but just walked on down the street and we never hear from her again. In that case, the function of the girl could be to demonstrate the single-mindedness of the boy. She would be part of the preexisting context, not a significant event that puts the story in motion.
The Big Question
Now suppose instead that on seeing the girl he falls in love with her. This is more like it. We now know the significance of the girl. She has interrupted the boy’s normal life. The plot takes a turn when the compelling odd event enters the picture. The boy now has to deal with a situation, a question, beyond his previous experience, something new. His life has been disrupted by his sudden love for the girl and he wants to win her. We now have a question. Can the boy get the girl? He must decide to take action to answer the question. Why? The standard explanation is that the question and its call for resolution have unbalanced his life so he must do something to answer the question in order to get back to normal.
That explanation will not do. It is intended for the audience and demands a suspension of disbelief so that the boy, a character created for a story, may be considered as a real person with free will. Even so, the explanation is flawed. In real life most boys who see a beautiful girl on the street admire her, wish they could win her, realize they can’t, and do nothing about it.
If you have ever written an original story, you know the backstage point of view. Why does the boy take action? Why does he respond to the question? Because the story needs him to. If he does nothing, the story dies; the audience gets bored, demands its money back and goes home. The characters are there to serve the story. The story does not serve the characters.
So it is with everything in the story. Each element of it helps make it a good story. Anything that does not has no business being there. That leads to a question. What is a good story? One that holds the audience’s attention. They might not agree with it but they are there for what the story delivers.
The question now is what stories deliver. The answer is that they deliver a lot. A well done story can entertain us. It can also teach us. It can also comfort, delight, scare, persuade, amaze, revolt, anger, distract, charm, ennoble, inspire, shame, pacify, embarrass, arouse, excite, titillate, or humor us. Stories move us in any number of emotional directions with a strength that can rival or even surpass direct experience. They are an extremely powerful way to convey information. Tell a wonderful, entertaining story and the audience will accept your fiction as valid.
The Appeal of Story
But why do we care? Why do we give our whole attention to some tale that can be, with our full knowledge, completely fictional, totally made up, something that never happened at all? We do because we want to know. Human existence is far too complex to ever fully master. By eliminating extraneous information, a good story gives us a simplified and therefore more comprehensible version of life. We need to understand reality in order to survive and prosper in it. We accept the fictitious story’s parallels to reality as accurate insights into life. Stories show us what could happen in circumstances we may not have experienced, thus helping us make sense of the past, cope with the present, and foresee the future. We are all anxious, we are all competitive, we are all curious.
We have anxieties. We are not sure how we stack up against other people, so we identify with characters in conflict with others, especially in conflicts similar to ones we fear. Unknown situations threaten us, so following a character’s strange adventures helps us cope with our fears.
We want acceptance and approval. There are aspects of each of us that are far from ideal which we hide from others. In a story a character’s weaknesses will be revealed. We are fascinated by the results of this exposure and how the character copes.
One benefit of acceptance and approval is having alliances with others. These may be with friends, kin, team members, or even strangers. The alliances may be informal or formalized such as contractual alliances between buyer and seller. We are dependent on these relationships for our survival, yet they always bear some level of instability. Stories are full of shifting, broken, underhanded, and deceptive alliances and we love to watch it all happen.
We are competitive. We want to win. We want to come out ahead of other people. Stories can show us winning strategies we can copy and mistakes we can avoid. We are shown how each of a character’s actions affect his forward progress and whether or not those actions are effective in conflicts with others.
We are curious. We want to know. We want answers. Stories are built out of questions and answers. A question is raised at the beginning and answered at the end. The boy will get the girl or he will not. Other stories answer different questions. A good story’s question engages us, for it has relevance to the uncertainties that frame our lives and drive us forward, the main one being “Which way is forward?” We need to know, to satisfy our eternal curiosity. We seek both new knowledge and confirmation of our existing convictions. We approach change with a mix of eagerness and fear.
We also depend on stories to help fill out our lives. Most of our days are routine and predictable. Stories take us on an emotional roller coaster through new territory and adventures. Stories enlarge our mental experience.
A story is like an experiment. Both lead us to an answer to a question, an answer larger than the particular chain of events witnessed. In an experiment we put this and those together under controlled conditions and see what happens. In a story we put a chosen group of characters into a particular situation and follow them to a conclusion.
Experiments are used to correlate cause and effect. The situation is simplified so that causes irrelevant to the question are excluded so that only causes of interest will affect the result. Thus we can see clearly what cause is making which effect happen. The knowledge gained is then applied to the larger world.
So it is with stories. The storyteller is trying to show a correlation between how certain actions by particular characters in response to the story question produce a specific result, the answer to the question. As is done in the experiment, a skillful storyteller eliminates everything from the story that is not necessary to understand the situation, characters, and actions that give the question that particular answer. Unlike real life, in which people have a wide range of actions, stories present a world of very limited action, so the answer and its causes and meanings are clear. Thus the story can make sense of the mysteries and confusions of life.
Time for Action
But how does the question affect the world of the story? When the storyteller puts the girl in view of the boy, the question of Can the Boy Get the Girl takes over the boy’s mind. His world has been expanded, because now it includes his love for the girl. If the story is to have any meaning, the boy cannot go back to his old life the way it was. The events of the story have changed his world forever. His life will never be the same. The question made a difference and so will the answer. That is why the story has meaning, why we care and why we pay attention to the story. The question and the answer it gets through the plot of the story matter to us.
So far in Boy Meets Girl we have a background reality context. We have a main character, a protagonist, the boy, and a secondary character, the girl.* We have an event, the appearance of the girl (pun intended), that raises a question.
Until the boy has finished his adventure with the girl, he cannot go back to a simple life of walking down the street and even then, his life will be different. Life has been disrupted by a question. Let’s rejoin the boy and see what he is going to do about it.
Oh, good. We got back just in time. He is walking up to the girl. He asks her “Will
you marry me so we can live happily ever after?” He has now taken an action to answer his
question. What are the consequences of that action? He could get an immediate answer. The girl could say “What a great idea, and it’s so fortunate that we are standing in front of a
church. Let’s go inside and get married.” They do and live happily ever after. The story
ends and the answer to Can the Boy Get the Girl is yes.
Suppose the girl accepts differently, saying “I’d love to marry you. I’m free on Tuesday afternoon. How does two o’clock sound?” Now the situation is more complex. Is the story over, the question answered? That depends on what we understand in the story “getting the girl” to consist of. If her acceptance of his proposal will do, then the story is over. If “getting the girl” requires marriage, the story will not be over until 2 p.m. Tuesday. If this story is at all typical, the boy and girl had better watch out, because getting to the altar on time will be the hardest thing they ever do.
Now suppose the girl says no. If the boy sees his love for her as a lost cause and gives up on her, he accepts her negative reply and the story ends and the answer is no. If he does not accept her answer as final, the question Can the Boy Get the Girl is still open and the story continues as he takes further action to win her.
The Way is Blocked
When the protagonist moves to answer the story’s question, we go from the beginning of the story to the middle, where we will remain until the climax.
The middle is usually the longest part of the story. It consists of a series of actions arising from the characters’ attempts to deal with the story question. Some will happen easily and go well. Others will be difficult and/or engender complications. The easy actions get brief mention. The heart of the story is actions that either are trouble or cause trouble. The characters run into obstacles. Stories are about characters (not just the protagonist) coping with these obstacles and the resultant complications. These events keep the main question from being quickly and easily answered so the story may continue.
Obstacles are what fill out the plot. Without them we wouldn’t have much of a story. Your average romantic tale could be reduced to one sentence. “Once upon a time they found each other, got married, and lived happily ever after.”
The storyteller puts obstacles in the path the boy takes to win the girl. As he deals with the obstacles, the boy will change the world by his actions and change himself by learning from his experiences. He cannot go back to a state identical to his previous existence. Each obstacle he copes with causes a shift in the world experienced by the boy and is another step in the process of transformation that is the story.
The boy is not the only one who faces obstacles. All the major characters have them so the progress of their agendas will be in doubt. We won’t know who will prevail. The answer to the story question will remain unknown until the storyteller reveals it.
Each obstacle creates a small story within the larger plot. The character has a problem, so we have the question of can he solve the problem and how. He will take action that will give us an answer. That answer will give him a new obstacle. If not, something else in the story, another character, the forces of nature, random chance, his own subconscious, has to do it. But there must soon be another obstacle. If not, the question-answer pattern will be disrupted and the audience will lose interest.
Similarly, if an obstacle is either trivial or impossible, the answer is obvious beforehand and interest in the story will drop at that point. If the girl’s reply to the boy’s proposal had been “Yes, if you will kiss me,” and he gladly and easily does with no complications, the story drops. If she says “Yes, but only if you grow to eight feet tall in the next three seconds,” unless the story is set outside normal reality, the obstacle is clearly impossible. Either the story ends at this point or the obstacle must become possible. He could try to get her to modify or drop her height requirement.
Trivial or impossible obstacles cause a problem. As soon as the question is raised, we know the answer, so the actions of the character give us no new information. Against a trivial obstacle the character prevails and against an impossible obstacle he fails. We already know that, so the storyteller loses our attention as our minds wander off to more amusing thoughts. He then has to win us back, which can be difficult.
Relevant Obstacles
In a normal story, obstacles are not random. Not just any problem will do. The question posed by the obstacle needs to logically arise from the main question of the story and the answer to the obstacle question needs to help fill out the answer to the main story question. The answer to the obstacle question is a secondary answer to the main question that will support the main answer we get at the end of the story. If in response to the boy’s proposal, the girl had answered “No, you don’t have a job,” we would accept that obstacle because we understand the relation of income to wedded bliss. If she had said “No, because the President of the United States wears ugly ties,” we would not take it seriously because there is no logical connection between the obstacle’s question and our understanding of how boys get girls. Note that the obstacle is neither trivial nor impossible. It would be difficult, but possible, for the boy to go to Washington and convince the President to wear better ties. But the story would have to first set up a logical connection between true love and presidential ties, or the story would become laughable.
Indeed, ridiculous, irrelevant obstacles are a standard part of comedy. Suppose the girl is two blocks away and the boy has one minute to get to her. First he is stopped by a sidewalk preacher. Then he has to go around a construction hole in the street and dodge heavy machinery. Suddenly he is blocked by a parade. After he fights his way through the endless marching band, all looks clear ahead. Then from a doorway a gorilla steps out and blocks his path. He gets free from the gorilla and a flying saucer lands in his way. I dare the audience to keep a straight face.
Obstacle Hierarchy
So far we have considered obstacles that are direct barriers to answering the main question of the story. Most obstacles stand between the character and the resolution of some other obstacle. To get the girl, the boy needs a job. To get the job, he needs to find who is hiring. To find that out, he needs to buy a newspaper. To get the newspaper, he needs fifty cents. To get fifty cents, he has to look under the couch cushions, but his roommate is asleep on the couch. If he wakes up the roommate, there will be further complications, on and on.
So it is with everything in the life of a character. Every little move he makes, every step he takes, is in an effort to overcome some obstacle, something standing between where he is and where he wants to be. As soon as he gets there he has a new set of problems. A character’s life in a story has a few successful moments like tiny islands scattered across a vast sea of trouble.
Since any character, if looked at closely enough, copes with a semi-infinite number of obstacles, much of the storyteller’s job is editing out and bridging over all obstacles that do not contribute to a full answer at the end of the story. If obstacles whose questions and answers are irrelevant to the main question and answer are left in the story, the audience will get anxious. They will ask questions like “What is the point of all this?” and “Where is this leading?” They feel that the story is meandering, wandering about with no clear goal in sight. The irrelevant obstacles divert the plot from the track the audience wants, movement toward the story’s answer.
Agenda Conflicts
One source of obstacles the characters face is each other. In a good story the characters have different questions they are trying to answer. This gives them agendas that are mutually contradictory. The boy wants to marry the girl now. She wants him to first get a job and improve his life. As they are discussing this, Mr. Cool rolls up in his shiny red sports car and winks at her. She gets into the car and they drive away, leaving the boy with a new set of problems. The girl will discover her agenda differences with Mr. Cool later on that evening.
The characters are such trouble for each other because the story needs them to be. Each one should to be a different kind of person who sees the world and his place in it in his own way and therefore has a unique set of needs and desires, an agenda different from the others. The questions of stories are about what kind of character will prevail in a given situation and how he will do it.
If each character is trying to advance his agenda and the agendas are mutually exclusive, they cannot all succeed. The boy and Mr. Cool cannot both win the girl. They could both lose. The girl could stay single. But that is not as satisfying. Who wants the game to end in a tie? We want winners and losers so we will know who is better, who is dominant, and which strategy we can learn from to come out ahead.
Obstacles are about dominance. Either the character dominates the obstacle and bends it to his will or the obstacle dominates him and he either does something else, some third force eliminates the obstacle, or that character’s involvement in the story stops.
Characters have agendas. They want. Which character will get his way? Usually one character prevails, then another. The dominance shifts. Stories are built out of dominance reversals. No one agenda prevails for long. That way, the outcome is in doubt because no one is reliably more powerful than anyone else. The uncertainty holds the audience’s attention and maintains the meaning of the obstacles, since the answer to the main question cannot be known yet.
Sometimes the story is best if an obstacle question is raised and left hanging while other questions are answered. The plot can change focus from one character’s situation to another. The interrupted unanswered question can increase suspense and thus the audience’s desire for an answer. The delayed answer pattern also keeps the story from being too straightforward and obvious.
Two simultaneous obstacles can reinforce the importance of each. While Mr. Cool is trying to make time with the girl, the boy must delay his efforts to find a job so he can think of some way to get the girl away from Mr. Cool. The audience does not know how well Mr. Cool is doing with the girl, so the boy’s attempts to sabotage their relationship are of more unpredictable outcome. At the same time, Mr. Cool’s efforts are of greater significance because of the obstacles being prepared by the boy. Can Mr. Cool win the girl enough to weather the upcoming challenge? The storyteller can switch back and forth between progress by the boy and Mr. Cool and keep the audience hooked.
There are three types of obstacles. First there are pragmatic obstacles. While Mr. Cool and the girl are in the restaurant, the boy is out in the parking lot trying to push the sports car into a handicap space so Mr. Cool will get a ticket. The boy has trouble because his shoes slip on the wet pavement. Second, there are obstacles caused by conflicts within the character’s agenda. The boy cannot put all his effort into moving the car because he is afraid of being caught and keeps looking around. Third, there are obstacles caused by another character with a competing agenda. Here comes Mr. Cool.
In stories, agendas advance with great difficulty, hounded by these three kinds of obstacle. This is the pattern of stories, over and over. The protagonist’s agenda is formed by the main question of the story. How he copes with the obstacles will give us the answer at the end.
The Climax
At the end of the story, after dealing with numerous lesser obstacles, we arrive at the largest obstacle in the story, the hardest one to overcome, the climax. This will be where all is gained or all is lost, because this final grand obstacle will give us at last the answer to the main question of the story. Because this answer will be filled out by all the secondary answers, it will seem more true, complete, and meaningful than it would have if the story had lacked all the other obstacles.
Yet at the same time, the climax must not be a trivial or impossible obstacle. The storyteller’s creativity will be tested, because the climax has been set up by the story question and the preceding obstacles, yet those must not make the answer obvious. The outcome must be in doubt until the last possible moment. Coming up with a satisfying climax is a real challenge for any storyteller and to have created one is a feat worthy of genuine pride.
Even if the story is one in a genre in which the outcome is known, the climax can still hold our attention. We know that in the mystery story our hero, the detective, is going to solve the murder. In our own story of Boy Meets Girl, we know that ultimately the boy will get the girl. So what do we do for a climax? We put the boy up against an apparently impossible obstacle that he overcomes by means supported by his actions against previous obstacles, yet that are not foreseeable by the audience. A common way to do this is for him to be forced by his desperation to move beyond his previous mental and physical abilities, to give more than 100%. Perhaps he runs faster than he ever has before, or thinks up a new understanding of the human condition that melts her heart.
Breaking new ground can make for an effective climax. If the protagonist believably thinks up what has never before been conceived and does what has never before been done in order to prevail, a good foundation for the climax will be in place.
What must not happen is for the boy or the situation to change its nature before our eyes to hand him an easy win. Suppose at the climax the girl is standing outside the church and the boy has about one minute to win the girl before she has to go inside and marry Mr. Cool, and suddenly word arrives that Mr. Cool dropped dead on the spot, so the boy gets the girl by default. Or, with one minute to go, and no foreshadowing, no hint of this in the story so far, the boy tells the girl his rich uncle in Australia died and left him ten million dollars. Endings like these are cheap shots. The audience feels cheated and disappointed because such endings do not provide valid answers to the original story question, answers that are supported by the previous obstacles and help the audience deal with their own lives.
What will work as a climax is for the boy to take action that we can believe he could and would take under the circumstances. The action will conclusively demonstrate that the boy is more worthy than Mr. Cool of the girl’s love. Perhaps the boy will risk his life to save the girl from some misfortune while Mr. Cool dithers. Maybe the boy will win a final confrontation with Mr. Cool which reveals how superior the boy is, thus winning the hand of the girl.
A common technique to justify the climax and increase doubt about its outcome is the use of the dark moment. Fate has turned against the boy. Everything has gone wrong for him. The girl is about to marry Mr. Cool. The boy couldn’t find a job and now he can’t find the church. He gets lost trying to take a shortcut through the woods. Despite running as fast as he can from the sheriff, he gets arrested for trespassing. He is now in jail. We want the boy to succeed but he is stuck, apparently doomed to lose the girl. Nevertheless, the boy does not give up. Somehow he finds his way to one last chance to get the girl and we move from the dark moment up to the climax.
After the climax has been dealt with and we have the answer to the story’s question, we reach the conclusion. Here we tie up loose ends as the characters return from their adventure to normal life. It will not be the same normal life as at the beginning, but it will be clear the story is over, and that the storyteller needs to get off stage now. My rule for plays is that once the question is answered, the playwright gets one page of script, maximum, to get that curtain down and send the audience home. There is little that will ruin a good story more effectively than a conclusion that goes on and on. The question is answered. The audience is ready to go home, wants to go home, but feels trapped and soon develops a hatred for the storyteller and his story. Whatever else you do, get off stage before they throw you off stage.
Dramatic Tension
The audience needs an answer to the story’s question. The obstacles as dealt with by the characters answer secondary questions related to the main question. The flow of secondary answers increases the audience’s emotional commitment to getting a final answer. A focused excitement occurs as the approaching main answer gains importance in the audience’s mind due to the gradual assemblage of secondary answers.
At the same time, the storyteller uses obstacles to both delay the final answer and keep it in doubt. The answer’s importance and its uncertainty keep the audience glued to the story in a state of dramatic tension. The audience thinks the excitement and tension are in the story. They are mistaken. The story is neutral. The emotions are in the mind of the audience. That is “mind,” not “minds.” A good storyteller will manipulate the attention of his audience into a state where every mind is in step with every other and they think and react as one—the mind of the audience. Some time when you are in a group story situation, perhaps at a movie or a play, consciously break your attention from the story and watch the audience. If the story has them in hold, you will see the unified mind.
The manipulation of attention is at the heart of good storytelling. The audience craves being taken for the ride and gladly gives time, money, and attention to get it. The ride consists of a carefully crafted emotional sequence. If the story kept the audience at the same emotional level throughout, the story would pall. It would be monotonous. The storyteller creates a dramatic rhythm with his choice, sequence, and timing of obstacles and actions. The audience is led up and down through a variety of emotions, building to the high point at the climax. The effect is heightened if we experience the story as real, for then it has more meaning since we accept it as an accurate view of life. It carries more weight with us, so we fall into the willing suspension of disbelief for the sake of the experience. Even though we know it is a made up story, we want to know what happened, we want to know if the boy got the girl.
What happened was as the boy was trying to make himself think of how to get out of jail, his mind kept going back to his memory of the trees and bushes flying past him as he ran faster and faster trying to outrun the sheriff. The way the trees went by—Yes!—that’s how to set up the coordinates and if you do that, those terms drop out, and the equations fall into place. The boy grabbed a paper towel and wrote it out. Yes, it really worked. He had algebraically solved the Three Body Problem. Just at that moment he was allowed to make his one phone call. He was so excited he called the chief mathematician at NASA and described his solution.
A few minutes later, not only did the boy have a solid job offer from NASA, they made the sheriff let the boy out of jail and give him a ride to the church. In walked the boy just as the preacher asked if there were any objections to the marriage of the girl and Mr. Cool.
The boy exclaimed to the crowd “Yes. I have algebraically solved the Three Body Problem and I have a job with NASA.” The girl ran to him and an awful row broke out. Soon the boy and Mr. Cool were rolling on the floor fighting. Mr. Cool was getting the best of it and almost subdued the boy. At that moment, the boy realized that Newton’s Third Law of Motion can be restated as “You can’t push on anything that doesn’t push back.” Armed with that knowledge he soon got the upper hand and won the fight and married the girl on the spot.
So the boy did get the girl, and just as we hoped, they got married and lived happily ever after (except for a minor disagreement a couple of years ago about the color of the living room drapes). Mr. Cool never married, but became the assistant manager of a discount tire franchise in Wichita Falls.
* The Three Body Problem is to describe the motions of three objects in space as influenced by their mutual gravitational attraction. So far, in the real world it has never been solved algebraically.
* The boy, not the girl, is the protagonist because it is his question, not hers, that is getting answered. If the same sequence of events were told such that they followed answering her question, she would be the protagonist and it would be her story, not his, that was being told.
III - MORAL
But why are stories wrapped around a question and answer? Why does that seem the right way to recount events? We tell them that way because stories are about morals.
Here the word “moral” means a statement about the nature of reality, as in “and the moral of this story is _______.” It is a general statement of truth of larger scope than the specific events of a particular story. We get not just knowledge of the adventures of the characters, but insights into what sort of place the world is and what life is all about and how to live it.
For example, take the story of the three little pigs. We have the Big Bad Wolf, the down-to-earth, hard working pig, Practical, and his two frivolous brother pigs, the musicians Fiddler and Fifer.
Practical builds his house solidly of brick, but his brothers use inferior materials, straw and wood. The hungry wolf blows down the flimsy houses, but Fiddler and Fifer run to safety in Practical’s brick house, against which the Big Bad Wolf’s industrial-grade lungs are useless. End of story.
What is the moral? What larger truth was shown here? The answer is open to where we see the primary thrust of the story. If we take it as a comparison of Practical’s virtues to those of his brothers, then the moral might be “working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure.” If the story is seen primarily in terms of the wolf versus Fiddler and Fifer, the moral might be “in times of trouble, seek help from other family members, especially the responsible ones.”
Usually there is more than one moral in a story; much of a story’s interest comes from the interactions between the morals.
Morals are not about Sin
Please note that I am not using the word “moral” in this book in the ethical sense, labeling virtuous and sinful behavior as “moral” and “immoral.” Dramatic and ethical meanings of “moral” are related, for statements about reality carry implications that some actions are better than others. Even so, it is important to keep in mind we are talking about the nature of reality, not ethical judgments against sin.
Guides to Action
A moral is a statement about reality. It may be a simple statement of fact, such as “spring is warmer than winter”. Often, though it is a guide to action, such as “it is wise to be kind to strangers”, that helps us know what to do. We combine these two to give facts greater meaning. “Spring is warmer than winter” together with “warmer weather is a better time for gardening” or “if you are out for a walk, you are less apt to be bitten by mosquitoes in cold weather” gives us morals with greater usefulness.
Morals help us know how to live and enhance our chances for survival. This is why morals matter to us. Neutral statements of fact by themselves are not guides to action so by themselves lack importance for us. We forget what does not matter, so we remember facts by turning them into ways to change our lives, giving them meaning they did not have before. “Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso” will not stay in your memory by itself. If you accept the moral that learning obscure facts makes you better than you were before, that moral will combine with the fact and you will probably remember it because then it becomes a way to improve your perceived position in the world and is therefore directly useful. You give the fact meaning.
We always face the problems of who we are and what to do next. We use morals, statements about the larger reality, to gain an understanding of life so we can feel secure and take effective actions. The most basic and important morals are never explicitly stated. We are unaware of them because they seem so obvious nothing else could be possible. Quite literally, they go without saying.
Moral Demonstrations
The source of morals is their demonstration through the action in stories. We think of action as physical, but it can take other forms, such as intellectual, emotional, imaginary, social, or spiritual. It is any change affecting a character and his relation to the world. The action in the story demonstrates to us the truth of the moral. If the demonstration is convincing, we will accept the moral as true, even though we have been given only a single example, not a proof. When a story shows an example of how a moral is true, that is a moral demonstration.
Morals arise out of story action. The observation of the weather is action in the story and demonstrates the moral that you can go outside in spring and feel the warmth. From that we can create the abstract idea that spring is warmer than winter. We also make a moral demonstration out of the emotional symbolism we feel by association with a warm spring day, commonly that “life is good.”
The obvious moral demonstrations are those resulting from actions taken by a character. We pay attention to what he does and how his choices of action fare. Less obvious are the morals demonstrated by actions not taken. A decision not to do what might ordinarily be done makes a statement about reality. Why didn’t he act?
Morals are also demonstrated by the setting. What kind of place it is makes statements about the larger world even if no character is there. Is the setting warm, safe, and sheltering or cold, damp, and creepy? We imagine characters there and react to that. “It was a dark and stormy night” is more than a description of the weather.
Morals can be demonstrated, but they also can be expressed directly. I can tell you a moral as well as show you. My telling you can help you understand the moral, but to fully get it, you need to see its demonstration.
Even so, the act of telling you the information is a demonstration of my attitude towards what I am saying that will affect how you assimilate and use the message. As soon as I tell you the moral, your mind, on some level, will start making stories using the new input to get the resultant moral demonstrations that lead to understanding.
I constantly witness the demonstration of the moral “people think in story form.” The purpose of this book is to help you recognize that moral when you see it demonstrated and to understand its many implications about human nature. After you read, you need to go out into the world and get the moral demonstration by seeing for yourself how stories structure our thoughts and lives.
The Answer to the Question Why
A moral is expressing that quality of the larger reality that caused the actions in the plot to have the results they did. We induce the moral from action that demonstrates the moral’s validity. Once we have accepted the moral, deduction allows us to use the moral to guide our actions. The moral is the principle behind the specific events. The moral tells us why things turn out the way they do. In addition to being a statement about reality that helps us know what to do, we can see a moral as the answer to the question why. Why did Fiddler and Fifer get in trouble when Practical did not? Because working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure. The pigs’ fate was controlled by a principle of reality, the moral. Whenever you ask why, you are asking for a moral, a statement about the larger reality behind the situation at hand that controls the events in question.
Nonverbal Morals
We think of a moral, a statement about reality, as something we can say in words, perhaps in a sentence or two. This is true of some morals but not true of most. A statement does not have to be verbal. It can arise from any experience we have. Movies have visual morals. So do paintings and sculptures. You see truths about the larger reality demonstrated and any attempt you make to put them into words falls short of their full meaning. Nonverbal statements can also be auditory. A person’s tone of voice creates moral demonstrations that can go far beyond his literal words. What would song lyrics be without music? Morals also can be emotional, imaginative, physical, or any other way we perceive.
Show me the Moral
Even though a moral is a statement about reality, it is usually not stated in the story. Most storytellers do not wind up with “and the moral of this story is _____,” telling you in so many words what the story is there to teach. Sometimes a character makes a speech near the end where he pounds the author’s point home. Both those techniques are too heavy-handed for graceful storytelling. A good story will do its work without them.
A basic rule of storytelling is “show them, don’t tell them.” The story does not tell us the moral is true; it gives us a convincing example that shows us the moral is true.
Through the actions of the characters and how well they fare against the obstacles and each other, we are shown what works and what does not, allowing us to extrapolate to what is true and what is not. A moral demonstration is a showing of some aspect of what the world is like and what our place is in it.
A story is not a proof of the truth of a moral but merely one example of it. A proof has to show how the moral is true in all cases and how contradictory morals are not. We get impatient with proofs. They are tedious because our minds don’t work that way. Our minds say “show me how it is and then I’ll understand.” We seek not a proof but a demonstration of the truth of the moral. A story delivers what we want.
A good story raises a question about what kind of place reality is and keeps the uncertainty hovering until the end. The story makes us doubt our own understanding of life and our place in it. The doubt is easily provoked, for we all have anxiety about our relation to others and how we fit into the overall situation. We may be able to forget that anxiety, but it affects us all the time. Notice how you are aware of your appearance even if no one else is around; we create ghosts of other people that watch us from inside our minds.
The moral is the answer to the moral question that drives the story. For the three little pigs, the moral question “Is it better to be a worker or a slacker?” organizes and directs the action. The moral question stands behind the story question of whether or not the wolf is going to eat the pigs. The story question is a setup for the moral question. As the plot gives us an answer to the story question, we get a moral demonstration that answers the moral question. We face similar questions in our own lives, so the moral question holds our interest. The question awakens our insecurity causing the story to engage our anxiety and making us care about the answer and thus be a good audience for that story.
If the story works for us, we will want to believe its validity. We enter gladly into the state of willing suspension of disbelief. We feel a relief when we enter into Storyland where life is less complex and moral demonstrations are clear and can be counted on.
We want to believe that the three little pigs escaped being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf and that nothing different could have happened. We have a need for solid answers in an insecure world. We want to be able to depend on the validity of the moral demonstration.
Creative Freedom
If you have ever written a story, you know better than that. You have a stack of blank paper in front of you. What you write is your choice, as is how far you take your story and what morals you care to demonstrate. The wolf could just as well have blown down the brick house and eaten all three pigs. The moral might then be “no matter what you do, if the forces of evil come after you, that’s it.” Or perhaps the wolf goes home and returns with a sledgehammer and knocks a hole in the wall. At that point Fiddler opens his violin case to reveal a Tommy gun with which he blows the wolf away, yielding the moral “God bless the Second Amendment.” The story could have been told many different ways.
In a work of fiction, the author can tell whatever story he likes and demonstrate any moral he wants. It is his choice. If he tells his story well, the audience will accept the moral demonstration. Being a storyteller is a powerful position.
A good storyteller chooses his characters carefully. The story is driven by the actions of the characters, yet they cannot believably act beyond the morals they bring to the situation and what they can reasonably learn or think up on the spot. The actions necessary to advance the story determine what sort of people the characters will represent, since who they are limits their possible actions. Don’t ask Huck Finn to act like Winston Churchill.
The storyteller needs to keep the development of the plot true to the characters and reality present when the central question of the story was raised. If you are writing a historical novel about King Henry VIII, don’t suddenly give him the powers of Superman to battle an invasion of flying saucers.
What a character can do will be limited by his abilities. Within those limits he decides what to do next based on the collection of morals that determines his view of reality.
The storyteller will want to have the next character live by a dissimilar group of morals, causing the two to perceive the world differently. They will thus have opposing desires, creating lots of conflict and an engaging story.
Moral Packages
The various morals, statements about the nature of reality, that a character lives by are one example of a moral package. A moral package consists of several morals with a unifying quality. You have one. Your overall concept of what sort of place the world is and what it all means is built out of the collection of morals you live by. Your moral package determines your world view, your values, and your priorities for your life.
Any philosophy or religion consists of a moral package, a theoretical model of reality, plus supporting structures such as stories and logical arguments to prop up its credibility.
Every human organization and social group has a moral package. We will explore this further in the Group Myth chapter.
In the course of events, your experiences affect your moral package, both directly and through information from others. This causes morals to evolve throughout life, often slowly, sometimes suddenly. A change in morals across time is a moral progression.
Stories are moral demonstrations. They exist to give examples showing the truth of their morals. They show us what kind of place the world is. They make statements about what happens if certain actions are taken.
The protagonist is given a particular moral package at the beginning. The storyteller will then choose obstacles that challenge that moral package. The protagonist will act to overcome the obstacles, but his problems are bigger than his moral package. His actions will have unforeseen consequences that demonstrate the flaws in his decision making, due to gaps and errors in his moral package. As he is forced to cope with one obstacle after another, his moral package will be altered and thus his perception of the world. At the end of the story, due to this moral progression, he will be different.
Furthermore, we, the audience, will be different. The story will have an impact. It will probably persuade us to believe the world is not quite what we thought. For us to care about the moral progression we must become aware of the gaps in our own moral package. Even if the thrust of the story only serves to confirm our previous moral package, if the story held our attention we will have had our morals put in doubt by the development of the plot and we will have undergone a moral progression of our own.
Characters are not People
In a story a character seems to be a human being. On stage Hamlet is portrayed by a human actor. His lines and his moves are what a person might do in similar circumstances. The audience emotionally accepts Hamlet as human. Yet he is not. He is a fictional character in a play. They are not the same. You have been alive for years. Hamlet enters in Act I and dies in Act V. His entire existence happens in one evening. What you see, what you hear, that’s it for Hamlet. That’s all he has. Hamlet has no experiences outside the play. Those five acts are his entire world. A character has only the story. He has no existence and no attributes outside the story.
You, however, have been alive for a long time. Countless experiences have made you who you are today. You have had to deal with many different moral questions. Hamlet only has to face the few in the script. On most issues he has no awareness and therefore no moral stance at all. What is Hamlet’s moral relation to grilled cheese sandwiches? None whatsoever. They don’t exist in his world.
Your complex life has left you with a huge moral package, one you have been building every second of every day of your life. You are incapable of listing every moral you have ever demonstrated. There are just too many. Hamlet has very few. He has only those that are necessary for the moral demonstration that is the play. Anything else would be superfluous and distracting. Too many morals spoil the plot.
Hamlet, as created by Shakespeare, is not a person but a character, and a character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory, created for the purpose of moral demonstration. You can read Shakespeare’s script and learn everything there is to know about Hamlet. You, however, are a human being and can never be fully known.
Confusion arises due to the human obsession with seeing people as characters. Suppose you spend two hours telling me about your boss. You won’t talk about what he is like at home or in church. Your stories will present a view of a man in just one of his roles: your boss. Furthermore, it will not be a complete picture of even that. You have already decided what sort of person your boss is, and will tell me only that which supports your predetermined conclusions about your boss and how you two do or don’t get along. The boss ends up like Hamlet-a character described in a short period of time and limited to those qualities that support a moral demonstration you wish to make. It is your story and you will tell it in such a way as to further your position. Note that the boss as the character you created lives only in your story. The boss as human is quite distinct and will be in the office on Monday morning with a different story to tell.
A character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory. Hamlet obviously qualifies, as do the three little hamlettes, who are clearly not pigs but humans in pig form. However, we can turn anything into a character. If you say “my car won’t start,” you have an obstacle between you and going to work. If you say “my car doesn’t want to start,” you have transformed the obstacle from an object into a character. The difference is an implied consciousness, the ability to make a choice, which comes out of the interplay of the situation and the moral package you imagine the car to have. The implied consciousness, free will, and moral package make the character as one of us, a human allegory.
Our predilection for turning inanimate objects into characters is a good example of the power of story over our lives. Treating a car as if it had a mind of its own is rationally ludicrous but dramatically advantageous. More characters can make for a better story.
We normally think of the characters and the situation as the foundation of a story. Here are some characters. They are who they are. Here is a situation. It is what it is. We put the characters into the situation and whatever they do, that is the story. Any morals demonstrated are the result of decisions and actions of the characters. This is a useful way to look at stories but it is not the only way.
Why do the characters do anything at all? They respond to the story question. Otherwise there would be no story. So only characters that will respond to the question will do. Furthermore, the characters and the situation must be the sort that can credibly answer the story the way the storyteller wants. Therefore, we can look at the question and answer as the basis for stories.
What about moral? We can start there, too. Why is the storyteller attracted to a particular question and answer? What about the question and answer did the storyteller find meaningful? No story stands alone. Stories are always part of the larger picture. Otherwise we would not care. The moral connects the world of the story and the larger reality.
In creating a story, you can start anywhere. Stories have grown out of morals, questions, characters, situations, relationships, actions, objects, a line of dialogue, a feeling. Anything that can be found in a story has been used as a starting point. But what about that starting point made it appealing, mentally engaging enough to inspire a story?
Ultimately the impetus comes from moral, the need of the storyteller to raise moral questions, to provoke moral anxieties, and to be a source of moral direction for his audience.
The characters and their actions are all morally driven. What the characters do comes out of their moral packages, which suggest to them what is the right thing to do. What they do is also in service of the storyteller and what moral he wants to demonstrate.
Story Defined
A storyteller is a god. When he says “Once upon a time,” he is creating a world. That world has no past and no future outside the story. It is a simple world, contained within the story, with some embellishments added within the mind of each audience member. In a well told story, there is no extraneous information. Only that without which the story cannot be told will be contained in the story. This makes clear the intended moral demonstration by only including what matters in this particular case.
Each character represents a different set of moral positions, a unique moral package in some way relevant to the main question of the story. These moral packages collide with each other, the world, and themselves through conflict, the obstacles that constitute the plot. How well the characters deal with these obstructions we understand to be a passing of judgment on the validity of the moral packages they represent. In a well told story, a moral package will evolve as a result of the obstacles it encounters. In other words, characters learn from their experiences, yielding moral progression.
A story is a test of a moral package. How well do its morals stand up to the challenge of the main question? We want to know, and we also wonder how we would fare in similar circumstances.
We see stories everywhere, but not everything is a story. We need a definition of story, so we will know one when we see it. There are three necessary conditions for information to be a story. Together they are sufficient to define what is a story. First, there will be one or more characters. They may take the form of humans, animals, spiritual beings, inanimate objects, or something else, but they all will have some moral relation to ourselves. Second, the situation and/or the characters will be affected by one or more actions that have some relation to the characters’ moral packages. Remember that actions are not necessarily physical. Third, arising from the combination of character, action, and any setting that may be present, there will be one or more moral demonstrations.
Stories may be large and involved, as Moby Dick. They may also be small. You open the door to your house. That is a story. You are a character and put your moral package to the test by the actions you take to deal with the obstacle of the locked door. You successfully open the door and demonstrate and thus confirm your moral that a particular set of actions will open the door. If you are fumbling in the dark and try to open the door with the wrong key, the story gets more complex.
Examine your life in light of this definition and you will realize the universality of story.
With story thus defined, we see that what we think of as a single story is really a sequence of related stories. Each attempt by a character to overcome an obstacle involves action resulting in moral demonstration. A closer look reveals that any action is a sequence of smaller actions, each with its own moral demonstration, so that the more we subdivide action, the more stories we see. Thus the obstacle hierarchy is also a story hierarchy.
Conversely, every story is a limited view of reality. There is always a bigger picture and a bigger story of which the story at hand is only a part. Every story contains smaller stories and is part of larger stories. This is true at whatever scale we observe the situation. It is a dramatic parallel to fractal geometry.
Everywhere we look we see stories. We think the world is full of them. We are mistaken. There are no stories out there. Stories exist only in the mind. They are a creation of the mind.
The novel on the shelf does not contain a story. The book is nothing but a bound collection of pages marked with ink. If you can read, you have the ability to look at the ink marks in a way that releases your awareness of words that generate a sequence of thoughts and images in your mind that form a story with some similarity to that envisioned by the author who created that particular sequence of standardized ink marks. The book is just a way to transmit thoughts from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader.
Your life does not contain stories, either. For a story in life to exist outside the mind, there must be action by a character yielding a moral demonstration, all in the larger world. Plenty of action happens outside ourselves. If you drive your car to Dallas, you did not just imagine the trip; you and your car really went.
What about character? You are a character in the car trip story and you did drive the car. Yes, but no. You, a person, an agent of action, physically drove the car. You, a character in the trip to Dallas story, are a dramatic device in the organization of information that is the story, and that happens only in the mind. You or anyone else can never know all there is of you. The best that can be done is to mentally create a character that represents you with some degree of accuracy.
Moral demonstration is also confined to the mind. The interpretation of action to yield validation of statements about a larger reality can only exist within us, where in combination with our perception and interpretation of character and action we create stories.
We tell stories in person or in writing or other forms of expression, such as pictures and music. We also enact stories, so that we experience the story directly rather than an account of it. Movies and stage drama come to mind. These are all stories in which the answer to the main question is predetermined.
Sports as Story
Other stories do not have a predetermined answer. An example is a football game. It is a highly structured situation—football has definite rules. Yet the outcome is in doubt. The main question, “Who wins?” will be answered after sixty minutes of obstacles. The Baylor Bears meet the Texas A&M Aggies on the football field. Who is the protagonist and who is his enemy, the antagonist? Both teams will play offense, and both teams will play defense (not at the same time, though). Is the protagonist simply whichever team has the ball? No. Stories don’t work like that. We want to identify with one moral package, be that one character, or one allied group of characters. So we do. The teams are in a symmetrical situation. Each is trying to outscore the other under the same set of rules. Yet everyone seriously watching the game will make a choice. Some choose Baylor as the protagonist. We call them Baylor fans. Those that see Texas A&M as the protagonist are Aggie fans. The choice is made through some form of personal identification with the team and the moral package it represents. Perhaps the choice is made in sympathy with (or in opposition to) the choice of a friend. Perhaps you went to one of the schools. Perhaps a thousand other reasons. But if we believe in the game we make a choice. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be any fun. It wouldn’t be a satisfying story.
And just as a story demonstrates the validity of a moral package, a football game is seen as a test of moral superiority. The fans accept the demonstration on the playing field as validating the superiority of the moral package of one side versus that of the other. If Baylor beats the Aggies, Baylor fans will feel that they are superior to Aggie fans, and that Baylor has been proven to be a better school than Texas A&M. Meanwhile the Aggie fans feel let down by their team and talk a lot about next year. That a football game could prove anything other than who scored the most is rationally ridiculous but dramatically valid. If the crowd watched the game for what was actually happening on the field, the prevailing attitude might be one of intellectual curiosity. It is what the game symbolizes that makes the fan a fanatic.
Football is a particularly clear example of the hierarchy of story. The sport is an ongoing cyclic story, year after year, in modern America. Each year’s football season is a story within the larger whole, beginning with spring recruiting and training and climaxing in championship games the following winter. Within the season, each game is a story. Who will win? Within the game, each half is a story. Within the half, each possession is a story. Can the team score? Within that story is the obstacle of getting ten yards and a first down, which depends on trying to make a gain on each play. Within the play there are many smaller stories. Can a linebacker get to the quarterback before the wide receiver is in the clear? The offensive line is trying to give the linebacker plenty of obstacles for his story with the quarterback, and each block is a story in itself made up of smaller stories yet.
Politics as Story
Our presidential election campaigns are the enactment of story. Each candidate is trying to place himself as the protagonist in the public mind. We vote for whom we see as protagonist, the one we care about, the one we have chosen as central to the plot of the campaign story. Our candidate will face various obstacles—gathering support, fundraising, getting on the ballot, getting known, getting his message (indicative of his character’s moral package) out to the voters, the primary season, and the fall campaign leading up to the election. The country has largely lost interest in the details of the national conventions because they are no longer a significant obstacle in the story.
War as Story
War is also story. In the abstract, war is a process by which one group forcibly bends another to its will. But wars are never fought in the abstract. War wears a heavy coat of presumed virtue. Each army says “God is on our side.” Each claims to be fighting for peace and justice. Each side is totally right and the other is totally wrong. The story begins with a question, proceeds through various obstacles, and has a moral progression to a conclusion. The dominance gained through winning the fight is seen as sufficient proof of moral validity. We as a nation asked ourselves a lot of questions after we were defeated in Vietnam that did not get asked after we won against Nazi Germany.
War is an inherently crazy activity. Wrap enough moral demonstration around it and you can get people to believe it makes sense. In Vietnam, we were fighting “godless communism.” We wanted to demonstrate that God was on our side and that demoncracy was a better form of government. A moral goal is seen as a greater justification for the sacrifices of war than a practical goal.
How could you believe in a war without seeing it as a demonstration of morals we idealize?
Life as Story
We put human achievement into story form and see it in those terms. When we set a goal for ourselves, we have created a story. The central question is “Can I achieve this goal?” We then proceed to deal with the obstacles between ourselves and the goal. We see the goal as one demonstrating some position we value, some kind of moral advancement. This does not necessarily mean that we become more “virtuous” in the classical sense, more honest, kind, enlightened, thrifty, etc. We well may. But the goal will be to advance us on some scale which we value. It could be, for instance, a reversal of social dominance—to get the upper hand over a bully, or make the neighbors green with envy, or to convince a friend of our point of view. It could be to make a lot of money or learn calculus or lose fifteen pounds. It will be something to change the situation to be more as we think it should be, to bring forth our values, our priorities, our moral position into the world, as validated by moral demonstration.
The appropriate goal will be neither too hard nor too easy. Its difficulty lies in the obstacles between us and its achievement, the obstacles of the story. Obstacles that are too easy seem trivial, not a significant moral test and therefore not worth doing, for lack of story progression. Boredom results.
Obstacles may be too difficult to overcome; one can die trying. We have two words for people who are attracted to goals with such obstacles. People that do so in demonstration of morals we support we term heroic. The others we call foolish. But for most of us, if we understand the goals to be impossible (not available at any price) or too hard (not worth price charged), we give up rather than face continued counter-demonstration of our morals. Price is much more than money. Price consists of sacrifices in forward progression of life on some fronts to gain progress on others. Is the goal worth the price? Is the moral demonstration sufficiently relevant to our story?
It is a story. We take on a commitment to a goal. Normal life has been interrupted by a question that will be answered before we can return to normal farther down the line. Life won’t be the same normal, due to our experience with the goal and our actions toward it. We will deal with various obstacles along the way which are relevant to our moral progression toward the goal. The goal will in some way be reached or not, answering the original question. This is story all the way. An appropriate goal holds our interest best, because for us it is a better story.
We use story form because we are on familiar ground. It makes sense to us, we understand it, and we find it both engaging and ultimately satisfying.
We see the lives of others in terms of story. What is gossip but stories about other people? We are fascinated by the moral progressions of others, by their obstacles and how they cope. We compare our progress to theirs and learn from their experiences.
We also see our own lives in story format because we live as characters in a story. Every action we take is part of a moral progression. Every action we take, consciously, at least, has a moral quality. We do what at that moment, overall, seems like the right thing to do. The action seems right because it demonstrates a moral we believe to be true. We may have thoughts later that we knew it was the wrong thing to do. This is indicative of a split between what we think our moral priorities should be and what they actually are, or that some of our morals contradict each other.
Our need for moral progression forces our action throughout life. Our lives are a series of questions that challenge our moral package, which evolves as we deal with life. Story structure permeates our understanding of our own lives and how we relate to the world.
Story Logic
Reasoning has a strong base in story structure, but story logic is not the same as rational logic. Stories are about the consequences of actions taken by characters. These consequences are a demonstration of some larger moral point. For that demonstration to be significant, there must be an assumption of repeatability. That is, if action A precedes consequence B in the story, then we are led to believe that in similar circumstances action A can be relied upon to precede consequence B, that A causes B, and the moral point holds. Our need for story structure leads us to believe in repeatability and causality, even when true repeatability and causality may be absent. Superstition is made out of this.
Here is another way story logic differs from rational logic. Even though a story is arbitrary, we will accept a moral on the basis of a good moral demonstration. Why did the plot demonstrate the moral? Because the moral was part of the background reality of the story situation in the mind of the storyteller. We enter into circular reasoning, an error in rational logic, but common in story logic. The plot demonstrates the moral because the moral determines the plot. Each creates the other.
Similarly, if we have a moral we need to believe, we will seek out actions that we can interpret as its demonstration. We convince ourselves that the moral is true in all similar cases even as we ignore counter-demonstrations and contradictory interpretations. Thus our moral package is never an accurate picture of reality or even our experience but instead is biased toward making our world as we need it to be.
Proverbs are an example of our irrational use of story logic. A man trying to reach a goal causes some damage along the way. He answers objections to his methods with “In order to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.” That one-sentence story about omelette creation is told to give a moral demonstration that it is necessary and permissible to cause destruction on the way to a desirable end. The proverb is told to counter objections to the harm he has caused. Even though what the man has been doing has nothing to do with eggs or omelettes and the objections have merit, the man will very likely silence his critics through story logic rather than through any rational discussion of the real situation. Such is the power of moral demonstration.
Stories are about the actions of characters. Action arises from a moral position and has moral consequences. Why did the character do a particular deed?
On one level, the answer is because the storyteller needed that action to happen to make the moral demonstration. On another level, the action is the result of the character’s moral package being challenged by an obstacle.
If you take the religious position that all of reality is a story told by God in which we each play a part, then the answer to any question why becomes “because God said so.”
A different point of view, that of free will, sees us all as semi-independent sources of action. “Why did you do it and what does it mean?” becomes a question most of us can answer, but never completely, because unlike characters, our moral packages are vast, extending farther than we can know.
Real life is not straightforward, but we want to see it that way. We want to be clear about the moral ground from which action arises into the world and the moral consequences it leaves in its wake. Seeing people and other sources of action as characters helps us do that. Characters have limited moral packages. Simple moral packages mean there are fewer morals to consider. By seeing people as characters we can convince ourselves that reality is simpler than it actually is, allowing us to easily assume we understand the whole situation when in fact we do not.
What is the moral of rainfall? Weather is an extremely complex physical system with a great variety of causal factors producing wildly varying meteorological effects. You get rained on or you don’t. It is not clear just why we got the rain and you did not. Yet we say “This year God has blessed our crops with rain.” There you have it-an incredibly complicated system reduced to one action (by a character!) and an implied moral demonstration (the virtuous get the rain they need)—story structure.
We are biased towards perceiving reality in simple terms, in repeatable terms, and in moral terms. Stories deliver on all three counts. The edited world of stories clears away most of life’s complexity leaving an easily grasped situation. Simple situations let us give life’s questions the short answers we crave. We want to apply those answers over and over as dependable explanations of reality, which is what we believe morals to be, and stories give us access to morals. To help us extrapolate known morals to new situations, we sort and classify everything into categories with common attributes as we search for patterns and rhythms. If we see a parallel between the new situation and a familiar one explained by our moral package, we like to assume understanding of the new by expanding the scope of a known moral to include it. The parallel is often not causally related to the moral, but even so, we typically need several counter-demonstrations of our old moral before we are ready to observe the situation carefully and accept the new moral it demonstrates.
We will further explore the logic of stories in the Mythic Logic chapter.
Story structure helps us but also limits us. What does it take for us to see a man for who he is rather than the character he represents? What actions might we take if we did them for their own sake rather than also for how they confirm our moral package?
Nevertheless, our use of story serves us well. We gain a lot of knowledge through stories. But is that the only way to think? What is it to think in a non-story way?
Beyond Story?
To do that would require an awareness without character, action, and moral demonstration. Pure perception will be aware of action, but not character or moral demonstration. But is that thinking? Perception lets you be aware you see something, but once you identify that something as, say, a chair, moral implications begin to arise, and the morals symbolized by the chair start turning it into an allegorical character whose presence causes action through the changes arising in your mind when you see it. Our minds create characters for our stories at every opportunity.
What about pure logic, as in mathematics? Let’s start with a simple example—two plus three equals five. There is action—two and three are combined. Is there moral demonstration? Yes, there is. With a few exceptions, the physical world obeys the laws of arithmetic. Add two apples and three oranges and you get five pieces of fruit every time.
How about character? Can numbers be characters? Inherently they are not. But we can turn anything into a character. Have you ever begged your computer program not to crash? The program cannot make the choice to crash or not, nor can it hear us beg, but we act as if it can. Similarly, any time we do arithmetic we have some anxiety about whether or not the numbers will behave. The worse our arithmetic skills, the more numbers seem to take on a life of their own, giving us different answers every time, being to us more character-like.
But two plus three equals five is easy for most of us. We can dependably get it right every time. The more routine the arithmetic is, the less the numbers are characters and the less the arithmetic is an obstacle. But it is still a story. Numbers are deeply symbolic. Like almost everything else, numbers carry emotional implications for us, so our attention on them causes emotional moral demonstrations that affect our feelings and thus our relation to reality. One immediately suggests unity. Two makes us think of opposing forces of duality—day and night, good and evil, yin and yang. Three implies Trinity. Four reminds us of stability, of north, south, east, and west, of the square and how that shape organizes space, and so on for other numbers, each with its moral package. We turn numbers into characters. Beyond that, you are part of the process. Numbers do not add themselves, and you are definitely a character.
Similarly, if you purely perceive with no further thought, you might not be thinking a story, but your act of perceiving is a story, so any self-awareness at that point puts your mind back into story.
Meditation puts the story on hold for a while, but to consciously meditate is a story in itself. Perhaps we escape from story when we drop into a meditative state without realizing it. What about when we are completely at one with what we are doing, so the action is just the action, with no larger meaning? Is there no moral demonstration?
Whatever you are doing, you are making some kind of choices arising from the interaction of your moral package and the situation. You may not be aware of the decision process and it is not necessarily verbal. It could be kinesthetic visual, as in hand-eye coordination. But whatever you are doing, unless it is pure reflex, as your brain makes the decisions that guide your actions, it is in a story, for as your conception of reality reflected in your moral package guides what you do, your actions are moral demonstrations.
It looks like it is essentially impossible for us to think outside of story. Therefore, we can conclude that stories are the basic framework our minds use to organize and process information.
Why Stories Matter
Our two greatest survival skills are our superior mental abilities and our faculty for uniting into an effective social group and coordinating our individual actions for the benefit of the group. A lone, ignorant human has poor odds of survival.
Stories are how we structure and make sense of information. The assumptions of causality and repeatability behind our perception of moral demonstration allow us to learn from the past. Our ability to use those morals to imagine new stories leads us to invent new skills, strategies, and tools that solve problems, overcoming obstacles to our survival.
Stories are also the basis for social organization and the common knowledge, agreements, and beliefs that underpin human culture. The group’s existence is the playing out of a story in which we each are a character and in which we all are supposed to act to demonstrate the morals of the group. We need others so we may survive and story lets us know what to do with each other to make that happen. Stories are essential to the continued existence of the human race. Without stories, we would not be here.
We will always be in a story, but we need not be constrained by the apparent limits of the particular story we are in. Our natural tendency is to flow along with the ongoing plot but we have the power to change its direction at any time.
This concludes our discussion of the inner workings of stories. You should now be able to look at a story, take it apart, see how each piece works, and how they all work together. If you have difficulty, you need practice. Reread these last two chapters while keeping in mind a story, any story, that you know well. As each story element is mentioned in the text, find one or more examples of it in your story. Repeat as necessary with different stories until you can do this quickly and easily. Turn to Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, and use the entries for the first three chapters to help you along.
Now when you go to a movie or read a book, you can let yourself be swept along with the story or you can sit there and take it apart and watch the storyteller’s craft in action. Later, when you discuss the story with your friends, you can tell them why the good parts worked and the bad parts did not and what should have been done to fix them.
Stories are basic to human experience. They shape our entertainment, our knowledge, our culture, our meaning, our thoughts and our lives. Now that you know stories from the outside in, we shall explore how we live in story structure.
Here the word “moral” means a statement about the nature of reality, as in “and the moral of this story is _______.” It is a general statement of truth of larger scope than the specific events of a particular story. We get not just knowledge of the adventures of the characters, but insights into what sort of place the world is and what life is all about and how to live it.
For example, take the story of the three little pigs. We have the Big Bad Wolf, the down-to-earth, hard working pig, Practical, and his two frivolous brother pigs, the musicians Fiddler and Fifer.
Practical builds his house solidly of brick, but his brothers use inferior materials, straw and wood. The hungry wolf blows down the flimsy houses, but Fiddler and Fifer run to safety in Practical’s brick house, against which the Big Bad Wolf’s industrial-grade lungs are useless. End of story.
What is the moral? What larger truth was shown here? The answer is open to where we see the primary thrust of the story. If we take it as a comparison of Practical’s virtues to those of his brothers, then the moral might be “working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure.” If the story is seen primarily in terms of the wolf versus Fiddler and Fifer, the moral might be “in times of trouble, seek help from other family members, especially the responsible ones.”
Usually there is more than one moral in a story; much of a story’s interest comes from the interactions between the morals.
Morals are not about Sin
Please note that I am not using the word “moral” in this book in the ethical sense, labeling virtuous and sinful behavior as “moral” and “immoral.” Dramatic and ethical meanings of “moral” are related, for statements about reality carry implications that some actions are better than others. Even so, it is important to keep in mind we are talking about the nature of reality, not ethical judgments against sin.
Guides to Action
A moral is a statement about reality. It may be a simple statement of fact, such as “spring is warmer than winter”. Often, though it is a guide to action, such as “it is wise to be kind to strangers”, that helps us know what to do. We combine these two to give facts greater meaning. “Spring is warmer than winter” together with “warmer weather is a better time for gardening” or “if you are out for a walk, you are less apt to be bitten by mosquitoes in cold weather” gives us morals with greater usefulness.
Morals help us know how to live and enhance our chances for survival. This is why morals matter to us. Neutral statements of fact by themselves are not guides to action so by themselves lack importance for us. We forget what does not matter, so we remember facts by turning them into ways to change our lives, giving them meaning they did not have before. “Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso” will not stay in your memory by itself. If you accept the moral that learning obscure facts makes you better than you were before, that moral will combine with the fact and you will probably remember it because then it becomes a way to improve your perceived position in the world and is therefore directly useful. You give the fact meaning.
We always face the problems of who we are and what to do next. We use morals, statements about the larger reality, to gain an understanding of life so we can feel secure and take effective actions. The most basic and important morals are never explicitly stated. We are unaware of them because they seem so obvious nothing else could be possible. Quite literally, they go without saying.
Moral Demonstrations
The source of morals is their demonstration through the action in stories. We think of action as physical, but it can take other forms, such as intellectual, emotional, imaginary, social, or spiritual. It is any change affecting a character and his relation to the world. The action in the story demonstrates to us the truth of the moral. If the demonstration is convincing, we will accept the moral as true, even though we have been given only a single example, not a proof. When a story shows an example of how a moral is true, that is a moral demonstration.
Morals arise out of story action. The observation of the weather is action in the story and demonstrates the moral that you can go outside in spring and feel the warmth. From that we can create the abstract idea that spring is warmer than winter. We also make a moral demonstration out of the emotional symbolism we feel by association with a warm spring day, commonly that “life is good.”
The obvious moral demonstrations are those resulting from actions taken by a character. We pay attention to what he does and how his choices of action fare. Less obvious are the morals demonstrated by actions not taken. A decision not to do what might ordinarily be done makes a statement about reality. Why didn’t he act?
Morals are also demonstrated by the setting. What kind of place it is makes statements about the larger world even if no character is there. Is the setting warm, safe, and sheltering or cold, damp, and creepy? We imagine characters there and react to that. “It was a dark and stormy night” is more than a description of the weather.
Morals can be demonstrated, but they also can be expressed directly. I can tell you a moral as well as show you. My telling you can help you understand the moral, but to fully get it, you need to see its demonstration.
Even so, the act of telling you the information is a demonstration of my attitude towards what I am saying that will affect how you assimilate and use the message. As soon as I tell you the moral, your mind, on some level, will start making stories using the new input to get the resultant moral demonstrations that lead to understanding.
I constantly witness the demonstration of the moral “people think in story form.” The purpose of this book is to help you recognize that moral when you see it demonstrated and to understand its many implications about human nature. After you read, you need to go out into the world and get the moral demonstration by seeing for yourself how stories structure our thoughts and lives.
The Answer to the Question Why
A moral is expressing that quality of the larger reality that caused the actions in the plot to have the results they did. We induce the moral from action that demonstrates the moral’s validity. Once we have accepted the moral, deduction allows us to use the moral to guide our actions. The moral is the principle behind the specific events. The moral tells us why things turn out the way they do. In addition to being a statement about reality that helps us know what to do, we can see a moral as the answer to the question why. Why did Fiddler and Fifer get in trouble when Practical did not? Because working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure. The pigs’ fate was controlled by a principle of reality, the moral. Whenever you ask why, you are asking for a moral, a statement about the larger reality behind the situation at hand that controls the events in question.
Nonverbal Morals
We think of a moral, a statement about reality, as something we can say in words, perhaps in a sentence or two. This is true of some morals but not true of most. A statement does not have to be verbal. It can arise from any experience we have. Movies have visual morals. So do paintings and sculptures. You see truths about the larger reality demonstrated and any attempt you make to put them into words falls short of their full meaning. Nonverbal statements can also be auditory. A person’s tone of voice creates moral demonstrations that can go far beyond his literal words. What would song lyrics be without music? Morals also can be emotional, imaginative, physical, or any other way we perceive.
Show me the Moral
Even though a moral is a statement about reality, it is usually not stated in the story. Most storytellers do not wind up with “and the moral of this story is _____,” telling you in so many words what the story is there to teach. Sometimes a character makes a speech near the end where he pounds the author’s point home. Both those techniques are too heavy-handed for graceful storytelling. A good story will do its work without them.
A basic rule of storytelling is “show them, don’t tell them.” The story does not tell us the moral is true; it gives us a convincing example that shows us the moral is true.
Through the actions of the characters and how well they fare against the obstacles and each other, we are shown what works and what does not, allowing us to extrapolate to what is true and what is not. A moral demonstration is a showing of some aspect of what the world is like and what our place is in it.
A story is not a proof of the truth of a moral but merely one example of it. A proof has to show how the moral is true in all cases and how contradictory morals are not. We get impatient with proofs. They are tedious because our minds don’t work that way. Our minds say “show me how it is and then I’ll understand.” We seek not a proof but a demonstration of the truth of the moral. A story delivers what we want.
A good story raises a question about what kind of place reality is and keeps the uncertainty hovering until the end. The story makes us doubt our own understanding of life and our place in it. The doubt is easily provoked, for we all have anxiety about our relation to others and how we fit into the overall situation. We may be able to forget that anxiety, but it affects us all the time. Notice how you are aware of your appearance even if no one else is around; we create ghosts of other people that watch us from inside our minds.
The moral is the answer to the moral question that drives the story. For the three little pigs, the moral question “Is it better to be a worker or a slacker?” organizes and directs the action. The moral question stands behind the story question of whether or not the wolf is going to eat the pigs. The story question is a setup for the moral question. As the plot gives us an answer to the story question, we get a moral demonstration that answers the moral question. We face similar questions in our own lives, so the moral question holds our interest. The question awakens our insecurity causing the story to engage our anxiety and making us care about the answer and thus be a good audience for that story.
If the story works for us, we will want to believe its validity. We enter gladly into the state of willing suspension of disbelief. We feel a relief when we enter into Storyland where life is less complex and moral demonstrations are clear and can be counted on.
We want to believe that the three little pigs escaped being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf and that nothing different could have happened. We have a need for solid answers in an insecure world. We want to be able to depend on the validity of the moral demonstration.
Creative Freedom
If you have ever written a story, you know better than that. You have a stack of blank paper in front of you. What you write is your choice, as is how far you take your story and what morals you care to demonstrate. The wolf could just as well have blown down the brick house and eaten all three pigs. The moral might then be “no matter what you do, if the forces of evil come after you, that’s it.” Or perhaps the wolf goes home and returns with a sledgehammer and knocks a hole in the wall. At that point Fiddler opens his violin case to reveal a Tommy gun with which he blows the wolf away, yielding the moral “God bless the Second Amendment.” The story could have been told many different ways.
In a work of fiction, the author can tell whatever story he likes and demonstrate any moral he wants. It is his choice. If he tells his story well, the audience will accept the moral demonstration. Being a storyteller is a powerful position.
A good storyteller chooses his characters carefully. The story is driven by the actions of the characters, yet they cannot believably act beyond the morals they bring to the situation and what they can reasonably learn or think up on the spot. The actions necessary to advance the story determine what sort of people the characters will represent, since who they are limits their possible actions. Don’t ask Huck Finn to act like Winston Churchill.
The storyteller needs to keep the development of the plot true to the characters and reality present when the central question of the story was raised. If you are writing a historical novel about King Henry VIII, don’t suddenly give him the powers of Superman to battle an invasion of flying saucers.
What a character can do will be limited by his abilities. Within those limits he decides what to do next based on the collection of morals that determines his view of reality.
The storyteller will want to have the next character live by a dissimilar group of morals, causing the two to perceive the world differently. They will thus have opposing desires, creating lots of conflict and an engaging story.
Moral Packages
The various morals, statements about the nature of reality, that a character lives by are one example of a moral package. A moral package consists of several morals with a unifying quality. You have one. Your overall concept of what sort of place the world is and what it all means is built out of the collection of morals you live by. Your moral package determines your world view, your values, and your priorities for your life.
Any philosophy or religion consists of a moral package, a theoretical model of reality, plus supporting structures such as stories and logical arguments to prop up its credibility.
Every human organization and social group has a moral package. We will explore this further in the Group Myth chapter.
In the course of events, your experiences affect your moral package, both directly and through information from others. This causes morals to evolve throughout life, often slowly, sometimes suddenly. A change in morals across time is a moral progression.
Stories are moral demonstrations. They exist to give examples showing the truth of their morals. They show us what kind of place the world is. They make statements about what happens if certain actions are taken.
The protagonist is given a particular moral package at the beginning. The storyteller will then choose obstacles that challenge that moral package. The protagonist will act to overcome the obstacles, but his problems are bigger than his moral package. His actions will have unforeseen consequences that demonstrate the flaws in his decision making, due to gaps and errors in his moral package. As he is forced to cope with one obstacle after another, his moral package will be altered and thus his perception of the world. At the end of the story, due to this moral progression, he will be different.
Furthermore, we, the audience, will be different. The story will have an impact. It will probably persuade us to believe the world is not quite what we thought. For us to care about the moral progression we must become aware of the gaps in our own moral package. Even if the thrust of the story only serves to confirm our previous moral package, if the story held our attention we will have had our morals put in doubt by the development of the plot and we will have undergone a moral progression of our own.
Characters are not People
In a story a character seems to be a human being. On stage Hamlet is portrayed by a human actor. His lines and his moves are what a person might do in similar circumstances. The audience emotionally accepts Hamlet as human. Yet he is not. He is a fictional character in a play. They are not the same. You have been alive for years. Hamlet enters in Act I and dies in Act V. His entire existence happens in one evening. What you see, what you hear, that’s it for Hamlet. That’s all he has. Hamlet has no experiences outside the play. Those five acts are his entire world. A character has only the story. He has no existence and no attributes outside the story.
You, however, have been alive for a long time. Countless experiences have made you who you are today. You have had to deal with many different moral questions. Hamlet only has to face the few in the script. On most issues he has no awareness and therefore no moral stance at all. What is Hamlet’s moral relation to grilled cheese sandwiches? None whatsoever. They don’t exist in his world.
Your complex life has left you with a huge moral package, one you have been building every second of every day of your life. You are incapable of listing every moral you have ever demonstrated. There are just too many. Hamlet has very few. He has only those that are necessary for the moral demonstration that is the play. Anything else would be superfluous and distracting. Too many morals spoil the plot.
Hamlet, as created by Shakespeare, is not a person but a character, and a character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory, created for the purpose of moral demonstration. You can read Shakespeare’s script and learn everything there is to know about Hamlet. You, however, are a human being and can never be fully known.
Confusion arises due to the human obsession with seeing people as characters. Suppose you spend two hours telling me about your boss. You won’t talk about what he is like at home or in church. Your stories will present a view of a man in just one of his roles: your boss. Furthermore, it will not be a complete picture of even that. You have already decided what sort of person your boss is, and will tell me only that which supports your predetermined conclusions about your boss and how you two do or don’t get along. The boss ends up like Hamlet-a character described in a short period of time and limited to those qualities that support a moral demonstration you wish to make. It is your story and you will tell it in such a way as to further your position. Note that the boss as the character you created lives only in your story. The boss as human is quite distinct and will be in the office on Monday morning with a different story to tell.
A character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory. Hamlet obviously qualifies, as do the three little hamlettes, who are clearly not pigs but humans in pig form. However, we can turn anything into a character. If you say “my car won’t start,” you have an obstacle between you and going to work. If you say “my car doesn’t want to start,” you have transformed the obstacle from an object into a character. The difference is an implied consciousness, the ability to make a choice, which comes out of the interplay of the situation and the moral package you imagine the car to have. The implied consciousness, free will, and moral package make the character as one of us, a human allegory.
Our predilection for turning inanimate objects into characters is a good example of the power of story over our lives. Treating a car as if it had a mind of its own is rationally ludicrous but dramatically advantageous. More characters can make for a better story.
We normally think of the characters and the situation as the foundation of a story. Here are some characters. They are who they are. Here is a situation. It is what it is. We put the characters into the situation and whatever they do, that is the story. Any morals demonstrated are the result of decisions and actions of the characters. This is a useful way to look at stories but it is not the only way.
Why do the characters do anything at all? They respond to the story question. Otherwise there would be no story. So only characters that will respond to the question will do. Furthermore, the characters and the situation must be the sort that can credibly answer the story the way the storyteller wants. Therefore, we can look at the question and answer as the basis for stories.
What about moral? We can start there, too. Why is the storyteller attracted to a particular question and answer? What about the question and answer did the storyteller find meaningful? No story stands alone. Stories are always part of the larger picture. Otherwise we would not care. The moral connects the world of the story and the larger reality.
In creating a story, you can start anywhere. Stories have grown out of morals, questions, characters, situations, relationships, actions, objects, a line of dialogue, a feeling. Anything that can be found in a story has been used as a starting point. But what about that starting point made it appealing, mentally engaging enough to inspire a story?
Ultimately the impetus comes from moral, the need of the storyteller to raise moral questions, to provoke moral anxieties, and to be a source of moral direction for his audience.
The characters and their actions are all morally driven. What the characters do comes out of their moral packages, which suggest to them what is the right thing to do. What they do is also in service of the storyteller and what moral he wants to demonstrate.
Story Defined
A storyteller is a god. When he says “Once upon a time,” he is creating a world. That world has no past and no future outside the story. It is a simple world, contained within the story, with some embellishments added within the mind of each audience member. In a well told story, there is no extraneous information. Only that without which the story cannot be told will be contained in the story. This makes clear the intended moral demonstration by only including what matters in this particular case.
Each character represents a different set of moral positions, a unique moral package in some way relevant to the main question of the story. These moral packages collide with each other, the world, and themselves through conflict, the obstacles that constitute the plot. How well the characters deal with these obstructions we understand to be a passing of judgment on the validity of the moral packages they represent. In a well told story, a moral package will evolve as a result of the obstacles it encounters. In other words, characters learn from their experiences, yielding moral progression.
A story is a test of a moral package. How well do its morals stand up to the challenge of the main question? We want to know, and we also wonder how we would fare in similar circumstances.
We see stories everywhere, but not everything is a story. We need a definition of story, so we will know one when we see it. There are three necessary conditions for information to be a story. Together they are sufficient to define what is a story. First, there will be one or more characters. They may take the form of humans, animals, spiritual beings, inanimate objects, or something else, but they all will have some moral relation to ourselves. Second, the situation and/or the characters will be affected by one or more actions that have some relation to the characters’ moral packages. Remember that actions are not necessarily physical. Third, arising from the combination of character, action, and any setting that may be present, there will be one or more moral demonstrations.
Stories may be large and involved, as Moby Dick. They may also be small. You open the door to your house. That is a story. You are a character and put your moral package to the test by the actions you take to deal with the obstacle of the locked door. You successfully open the door and demonstrate and thus confirm your moral that a particular set of actions will open the door. If you are fumbling in the dark and try to open the door with the wrong key, the story gets more complex.
Examine your life in light of this definition and you will realize the universality of story.
With story thus defined, we see that what we think of as a single story is really a sequence of related stories. Each attempt by a character to overcome an obstacle involves action resulting in moral demonstration. A closer look reveals that any action is a sequence of smaller actions, each with its own moral demonstration, so that the more we subdivide action, the more stories we see. Thus the obstacle hierarchy is also a story hierarchy.
Conversely, every story is a limited view of reality. There is always a bigger picture and a bigger story of which the story at hand is only a part. Every story contains smaller stories and is part of larger stories. This is true at whatever scale we observe the situation. It is a dramatic parallel to fractal geometry.
Everywhere we look we see stories. We think the world is full of them. We are mistaken. There are no stories out there. Stories exist only in the mind. They are a creation of the mind.
The novel on the shelf does not contain a story. The book is nothing but a bound collection of pages marked with ink. If you can read, you have the ability to look at the ink marks in a way that releases your awareness of words that generate a sequence of thoughts and images in your mind that form a story with some similarity to that envisioned by the author who created that particular sequence of standardized ink marks. The book is just a way to transmit thoughts from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader.
Your life does not contain stories, either. For a story in life to exist outside the mind, there must be action by a character yielding a moral demonstration, all in the larger world. Plenty of action happens outside ourselves. If you drive your car to Dallas, you did not just imagine the trip; you and your car really went.
What about character? You are a character in the car trip story and you did drive the car. Yes, but no. You, a person, an agent of action, physically drove the car. You, a character in the trip to Dallas story, are a dramatic device in the organization of information that is the story, and that happens only in the mind. You or anyone else can never know all there is of you. The best that can be done is to mentally create a character that represents you with some degree of accuracy.
Moral demonstration is also confined to the mind. The interpretation of action to yield validation of statements about a larger reality can only exist within us, where in combination with our perception and interpretation of character and action we create stories.
We tell stories in person or in writing or other forms of expression, such as pictures and music. We also enact stories, so that we experience the story directly rather than an account of it. Movies and stage drama come to mind. These are all stories in which the answer to the main question is predetermined.
Sports as Story
Other stories do not have a predetermined answer. An example is a football game. It is a highly structured situation—football has definite rules. Yet the outcome is in doubt. The main question, “Who wins?” will be answered after sixty minutes of obstacles. The Baylor Bears meet the Texas A&M Aggies on the football field. Who is the protagonist and who is his enemy, the antagonist? Both teams will play offense, and both teams will play defense (not at the same time, though). Is the protagonist simply whichever team has the ball? No. Stories don’t work like that. We want to identify with one moral package, be that one character, or one allied group of characters. So we do. The teams are in a symmetrical situation. Each is trying to outscore the other under the same set of rules. Yet everyone seriously watching the game will make a choice. Some choose Baylor as the protagonist. We call them Baylor fans. Those that see Texas A&M as the protagonist are Aggie fans. The choice is made through some form of personal identification with the team and the moral package it represents. Perhaps the choice is made in sympathy with (or in opposition to) the choice of a friend. Perhaps you went to one of the schools. Perhaps a thousand other reasons. But if we believe in the game we make a choice. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be any fun. It wouldn’t be a satisfying story.
And just as a story demonstrates the validity of a moral package, a football game is seen as a test of moral superiority. The fans accept the demonstration on the playing field as validating the superiority of the moral package of one side versus that of the other. If Baylor beats the Aggies, Baylor fans will feel that they are superior to Aggie fans, and that Baylor has been proven to be a better school than Texas A&M. Meanwhile the Aggie fans feel let down by their team and talk a lot about next year. That a football game could prove anything other than who scored the most is rationally ridiculous but dramatically valid. If the crowd watched the game for what was actually happening on the field, the prevailing attitude might be one of intellectual curiosity. It is what the game symbolizes that makes the fan a fanatic.
Football is a particularly clear example of the hierarchy of story. The sport is an ongoing cyclic story, year after year, in modern America. Each year’s football season is a story within the larger whole, beginning with spring recruiting and training and climaxing in championship games the following winter. Within the season, each game is a story. Who will win? Within the game, each half is a story. Within the half, each possession is a story. Can the team score? Within that story is the obstacle of getting ten yards and a first down, which depends on trying to make a gain on each play. Within the play there are many smaller stories. Can a linebacker get to the quarterback before the wide receiver is in the clear? The offensive line is trying to give the linebacker plenty of obstacles for his story with the quarterback, and each block is a story in itself made up of smaller stories yet.
Politics as Story
Our presidential election campaigns are the enactment of story. Each candidate is trying to place himself as the protagonist in the public mind. We vote for whom we see as protagonist, the one we care about, the one we have chosen as central to the plot of the campaign story. Our candidate will face various obstacles—gathering support, fundraising, getting on the ballot, getting known, getting his message (indicative of his character’s moral package) out to the voters, the primary season, and the fall campaign leading up to the election. The country has largely lost interest in the details of the national conventions because they are no longer a significant obstacle in the story.
War as Story
War is also story. In the abstract, war is a process by which one group forcibly bends another to its will. But wars are never fought in the abstract. War wears a heavy coat of presumed virtue. Each army says “God is on our side.” Each claims to be fighting for peace and justice. Each side is totally right and the other is totally wrong. The story begins with a question, proceeds through various obstacles, and has a moral progression to a conclusion. The dominance gained through winning the fight is seen as sufficient proof of moral validity. We as a nation asked ourselves a lot of questions after we were defeated in Vietnam that did not get asked after we won against Nazi Germany.
War is an inherently crazy activity. Wrap enough moral demonstration around it and you can get people to believe it makes sense. In Vietnam, we were fighting “godless communism.” We wanted to demonstrate that God was on our side and that demoncracy was a better form of government. A moral goal is seen as a greater justification for the sacrifices of war than a practical goal.
How could you believe in a war without seeing it as a demonstration of morals we idealize?
Life as Story
We put human achievement into story form and see it in those terms. When we set a goal for ourselves, we have created a story. The central question is “Can I achieve this goal?” We then proceed to deal with the obstacles between ourselves and the goal. We see the goal as one demonstrating some position we value, some kind of moral advancement. This does not necessarily mean that we become more “virtuous” in the classical sense, more honest, kind, enlightened, thrifty, etc. We well may. But the goal will be to advance us on some scale which we value. It could be, for instance, a reversal of social dominance—to get the upper hand over a bully, or make the neighbors green with envy, or to convince a friend of our point of view. It could be to make a lot of money or learn calculus or lose fifteen pounds. It will be something to change the situation to be more as we think it should be, to bring forth our values, our priorities, our moral position into the world, as validated by moral demonstration.
The appropriate goal will be neither too hard nor too easy. Its difficulty lies in the obstacles between us and its achievement, the obstacles of the story. Obstacles that are too easy seem trivial, not a significant moral test and therefore not worth doing, for lack of story progression. Boredom results.
Obstacles may be too difficult to overcome; one can die trying. We have two words for people who are attracted to goals with such obstacles. People that do so in demonstration of morals we support we term heroic. The others we call foolish. But for most of us, if we understand the goals to be impossible (not available at any price) or too hard (not worth price charged), we give up rather than face continued counter-demonstration of our morals. Price is much more than money. Price consists of sacrifices in forward progression of life on some fronts to gain progress on others. Is the goal worth the price? Is the moral demonstration sufficiently relevant to our story?
It is a story. We take on a commitment to a goal. Normal life has been interrupted by a question that will be answered before we can return to normal farther down the line. Life won’t be the same normal, due to our experience with the goal and our actions toward it. We will deal with various obstacles along the way which are relevant to our moral progression toward the goal. The goal will in some way be reached or not, answering the original question. This is story all the way. An appropriate goal holds our interest best, because for us it is a better story.
We use story form because we are on familiar ground. It makes sense to us, we understand it, and we find it both engaging and ultimately satisfying.
We see the lives of others in terms of story. What is gossip but stories about other people? We are fascinated by the moral progressions of others, by their obstacles and how they cope. We compare our progress to theirs and learn from their experiences.
We also see our own lives in story format because we live as characters in a story. Every action we take is part of a moral progression. Every action we take, consciously, at least, has a moral quality. We do what at that moment, overall, seems like the right thing to do. The action seems right because it demonstrates a moral we believe to be true. We may have thoughts later that we knew it was the wrong thing to do. This is indicative of a split between what we think our moral priorities should be and what they actually are, or that some of our morals contradict each other.
Our need for moral progression forces our action throughout life. Our lives are a series of questions that challenge our moral package, which evolves as we deal with life. Story structure permeates our understanding of our own lives and how we relate to the world.
Story Logic
Reasoning has a strong base in story structure, but story logic is not the same as rational logic. Stories are about the consequences of actions taken by characters. These consequences are a demonstration of some larger moral point. For that demonstration to be significant, there must be an assumption of repeatability. That is, if action A precedes consequence B in the story, then we are led to believe that in similar circumstances action A can be relied upon to precede consequence B, that A causes B, and the moral point holds. Our need for story structure leads us to believe in repeatability and causality, even when true repeatability and causality may be absent. Superstition is made out of this.
Here is another way story logic differs from rational logic. Even though a story is arbitrary, we will accept a moral on the basis of a good moral demonstration. Why did the plot demonstrate the moral? Because the moral was part of the background reality of the story situation in the mind of the storyteller. We enter into circular reasoning, an error in rational logic, but common in story logic. The plot demonstrates the moral because the moral determines the plot. Each creates the other.
Similarly, if we have a moral we need to believe, we will seek out actions that we can interpret as its demonstration. We convince ourselves that the moral is true in all similar cases even as we ignore counter-demonstrations and contradictory interpretations. Thus our moral package is never an accurate picture of reality or even our experience but instead is biased toward making our world as we need it to be.
Proverbs are an example of our irrational use of story logic. A man trying to reach a goal causes some damage along the way. He answers objections to his methods with “In order to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.” That one-sentence story about omelette creation is told to give a moral demonstration that it is necessary and permissible to cause destruction on the way to a desirable end. The proverb is told to counter objections to the harm he has caused. Even though what the man has been doing has nothing to do with eggs or omelettes and the objections have merit, the man will very likely silence his critics through story logic rather than through any rational discussion of the real situation. Such is the power of moral demonstration.
Stories are about the actions of characters. Action arises from a moral position and has moral consequences. Why did the character do a particular deed?
On one level, the answer is because the storyteller needed that action to happen to make the moral demonstration. On another level, the action is the result of the character’s moral package being challenged by an obstacle.
If you take the religious position that all of reality is a story told by God in which we each play a part, then the answer to any question why becomes “because God said so.”
A different point of view, that of free will, sees us all as semi-independent sources of action. “Why did you do it and what does it mean?” becomes a question most of us can answer, but never completely, because unlike characters, our moral packages are vast, extending farther than we can know.
Real life is not straightforward, but we want to see it that way. We want to be clear about the moral ground from which action arises into the world and the moral consequences it leaves in its wake. Seeing people and other sources of action as characters helps us do that. Characters have limited moral packages. Simple moral packages mean there are fewer morals to consider. By seeing people as characters we can convince ourselves that reality is simpler than it actually is, allowing us to easily assume we understand the whole situation when in fact we do not.
What is the moral of rainfall? Weather is an extremely complex physical system with a great variety of causal factors producing wildly varying meteorological effects. You get rained on or you don’t. It is not clear just why we got the rain and you did not. Yet we say “This year God has blessed our crops with rain.” There you have it-an incredibly complicated system reduced to one action (by a character!) and an implied moral demonstration (the virtuous get the rain they need)—story structure.
We are biased towards perceiving reality in simple terms, in repeatable terms, and in moral terms. Stories deliver on all three counts. The edited world of stories clears away most of life’s complexity leaving an easily grasped situation. Simple situations let us give life’s questions the short answers we crave. We want to apply those answers over and over as dependable explanations of reality, which is what we believe morals to be, and stories give us access to morals. To help us extrapolate known morals to new situations, we sort and classify everything into categories with common attributes as we search for patterns and rhythms. If we see a parallel between the new situation and a familiar one explained by our moral package, we like to assume understanding of the new by expanding the scope of a known moral to include it. The parallel is often not causally related to the moral, but even so, we typically need several counter-demonstrations of our old moral before we are ready to observe the situation carefully and accept the new moral it demonstrates.
We will further explore the logic of stories in the Mythic Logic chapter.
Story structure helps us but also limits us. What does it take for us to see a man for who he is rather than the character he represents? What actions might we take if we did them for their own sake rather than also for how they confirm our moral package?
Nevertheless, our use of story serves us well. We gain a lot of knowledge through stories. But is that the only way to think? What is it to think in a non-story way?
Beyond Story?
To do that would require an awareness without character, action, and moral demonstration. Pure perception will be aware of action, but not character or moral demonstration. But is that thinking? Perception lets you be aware you see something, but once you identify that something as, say, a chair, moral implications begin to arise, and the morals symbolized by the chair start turning it into an allegorical character whose presence causes action through the changes arising in your mind when you see it. Our minds create characters for our stories at every opportunity.
What about pure logic, as in mathematics? Let’s start with a simple example—two plus three equals five. There is action—two and three are combined. Is there moral demonstration? Yes, there is. With a few exceptions, the physical world obeys the laws of arithmetic. Add two apples and three oranges and you get five pieces of fruit every time.
How about character? Can numbers be characters? Inherently they are not. But we can turn anything into a character. Have you ever begged your computer program not to crash? The program cannot make the choice to crash or not, nor can it hear us beg, but we act as if it can. Similarly, any time we do arithmetic we have some anxiety about whether or not the numbers will behave. The worse our arithmetic skills, the more numbers seem to take on a life of their own, giving us different answers every time, being to us more character-like.
But two plus three equals five is easy for most of us. We can dependably get it right every time. The more routine the arithmetic is, the less the numbers are characters and the less the arithmetic is an obstacle. But it is still a story. Numbers are deeply symbolic. Like almost everything else, numbers carry emotional implications for us, so our attention on them causes emotional moral demonstrations that affect our feelings and thus our relation to reality. One immediately suggests unity. Two makes us think of opposing forces of duality—day and night, good and evil, yin and yang. Three implies Trinity. Four reminds us of stability, of north, south, east, and west, of the square and how that shape organizes space, and so on for other numbers, each with its moral package. We turn numbers into characters. Beyond that, you are part of the process. Numbers do not add themselves, and you are definitely a character.
Similarly, if you purely perceive with no further thought, you might not be thinking a story, but your act of perceiving is a story, so any self-awareness at that point puts your mind back into story.
Meditation puts the story on hold for a while, but to consciously meditate is a story in itself. Perhaps we escape from story when we drop into a meditative state without realizing it. What about when we are completely at one with what we are doing, so the action is just the action, with no larger meaning? Is there no moral demonstration?
Whatever you are doing, you are making some kind of choices arising from the interaction of your moral package and the situation. You may not be aware of the decision process and it is not necessarily verbal. It could be kinesthetic visual, as in hand-eye coordination. But whatever you are doing, unless it is pure reflex, as your brain makes the decisions that guide your actions, it is in a story, for as your conception of reality reflected in your moral package guides what you do, your actions are moral demonstrations.
It looks like it is essentially impossible for us to think outside of story. Therefore, we can conclude that stories are the basic framework our minds use to organize and process information.
Why Stories Matter
Our two greatest survival skills are our superior mental abilities and our faculty for uniting into an effective social group and coordinating our individual actions for the benefit of the group. A lone, ignorant human has poor odds of survival.
Stories are how we structure and make sense of information. The assumptions of causality and repeatability behind our perception of moral demonstration allow us to learn from the past. Our ability to use those morals to imagine new stories leads us to invent new skills, strategies, and tools that solve problems, overcoming obstacles to our survival.
Stories are also the basis for social organization and the common knowledge, agreements, and beliefs that underpin human culture. The group’s existence is the playing out of a story in which we each are a character and in which we all are supposed to act to demonstrate the morals of the group. We need others so we may survive and story lets us know what to do with each other to make that happen. Stories are essential to the continued existence of the human race. Without stories, we would not be here.
We will always be in a story, but we need not be constrained by the apparent limits of the particular story we are in. Our natural tendency is to flow along with the ongoing plot but we have the power to change its direction at any time.
This concludes our discussion of the inner workings of stories. You should now be able to look at a story, take it apart, see how each piece works, and how they all work together. If you have difficulty, you need practice. Reread these last two chapters while keeping in mind a story, any story, that you know well. As each story element is mentioned in the text, find one or more examples of it in your story. Repeat as necessary with different stories until you can do this quickly and easily. Turn to Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, and use the entries for the first three chapters to help you along.
Now when you go to a movie or read a book, you can let yourself be swept along with the story or you can sit there and take it apart and watch the storyteller’s craft in action. Later, when you discuss the story with your friends, you can tell them why the good parts worked and the bad parts did not and what should have been done to fix them.
Stories are basic to human experience. They shape our entertainment, our knowledge, our culture, our meaning, our thoughts and our lives. Now that you know stories from the outside in, we shall explore how we live in story structure.
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